Eastern front #50 The Second Battle of Kharkiv

Eastern Front #52 Operation Hannover

Last time we spoke about the disaster at Donetz. At the start of May 1942, Germany’s Operation Fridericus triggered a sudden counteroffensive from Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army toward Kharkov. The Soviets failed to detect the buildup and, when Kleist’s thrust hit, the 9th Army collapsed rapidly; reserves were poorly pre-positioned, fortifications were neglected, and the Southern Front’s air activity was negligible against Luftwaffe dominance. Soviet attempts to contain the breakthrough—through hurried tank corps moves and delayed redeployments—could not stop sealed penetrations or halt the German advance to key Donets crossings. Elsewhere, German plans to neutralize Soviet partisans (Operation Hannover) were disrupted by successful deception and intelligence leaks around Belov. Meanwhile, heavy siege artillery and Soviet preparations at Sevastopol signaled the next phase of the campaign. This episode is Operation Hanover Well hello there, welcome to the Eastern Front week by week podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about world war two? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on world war two and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel you can find a few videos all the way from the Opium Wars of the 1800’s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.    Last week’s success at Kestenga had come at the price of growing friction between Dietl and Siilasvuo. This tension arose because the latter had issued orders that lacked approval from Army Command, and the Germans had formed the impression that Finnish troops were showing reluctance to take part in intense combat. The combined German and Finnish losses at Kestenga reached 5,500, while those at Zapadnaya Litsa totaled 3,200. In exchange, the Finnish 3rd Corps asserted that it had caused 15,000 Soviet casualties. The Finns also maintained that Soviet losses in the rear areas were likewise substantial because of artillery barrages and air strikes. Meanwhile the Mountain Corps Norway reported that it had inflicted 8,000 Soviet deaths at Zapadnaya Litsa. These differences in casualty figures—whether accurate or inflated—nonetheless illustrated the brutal, grinding character of the fighting in the far north, where rugged terrain, thick taiga forests, and an almost complete lack of roads compelled both sides to fight for every frozen streambed and forest path at extremely close quarters.   The disagreement persisted into the current week. Irritated by Dietl’s decision to restrict his authority, Siilasvuo directed the removal of every Finnish unit from the German zone of operations. He further insisted that all horses and carts previously loaned to the Germans be returned inside three days. Such a step would have stripped the Army of Lapland of any logistical capacity whatsoever. Dietl was therefore forced to plead with Siilasvuo in the spirit of comradeship-in-arms so that the Germans would not be abandoned in a difficult situation. The incident highlighted a persistent weakness in Axis coalition operations: Finnish officers, mindful of their nation’s separate war goals centered on reclaiming the lands lost in 1940, resented being placed under German operational control and were unwilling to accept heavy losses for aims they viewed as serving purely German interests.   The Finnish 3rd Corps had remained subordinated to the Army of Lapland throughout the winter because Mannerheim had continued to show interest in restarting joint Finnish–German actions aimed at Murmansk. In addition, the German 5th and 7th Mountain Divisions, which had been scheduled to relieve the Kestenga sector, had been unable to reach Finland because winter ice had sealed the Finnish ports. Faced with this emergency, Dietl insisted that every German formation be made fully self-sufficient and independent of Finnish assistance as quickly as possible. He also urged the OKH to speed up the arrival of the 7th Mountain Division, part of which was still tied down with Army Group North. The deeper strategic difficulty was one that Germany had never managed to solve: the Murmansk railway kept delivering Allied supplies far into the Soviet heartland, and as long as the Finns refused to push south against it, the Army of Lapland simply lacked both the manpower and the logistical reach to cut the line on its own.   Back on the 21st, Convoy PQ 16 had departed. Comprising 35 merchant ships, 4 cruisers, and 3 destroyers, it ranked among the largest convoys yet sent to the USSR. During the voyage it would also be reinforced by three additional Soviet destroyers. The lengthening daylight hours rendered submarine attacks too hazardous but favored the operations of naval bombers. On the 27th, 100 high-altitude Ju-88 bombers together with 8 He-111 torpedo bombers struck the convoy and succeeded in sinking only four vessels. Nevertheless, the attackers’ use of mixed altitudes had confused the defensive anti-aircraft fire and caused it to lose concentration. This same approach would be employed repeatedly over the following four days in a series of raids against the convoy. Altogether these air assaults sank 6 ships. One merchant vessel was lost to a German submarine, and another ship struck a Soviet mine upon reaching Murmansk. Moreover, many of the surviving merchant ships that made it into Soviet ports had sustained heavy damage. Despite these setbacks, the great majority of the convoy’s cargo arrived safely in Soviet harbors, proving that even under repeated Luftwaffe pressure the Arctic supply route stayed open. The tanks, aircraft, raw materials, and foodstuffs carried by PQ 16 and the convoys that followed were flowing straight into the Soviet war economy at a time when the Red Army was suffering enormous losses across several fronts at once.   In parallel, Germany kept up its air offensive throughout May in an effort to disrupt the flow of supplies reaching Leningrad. On the 28th a large raid involving more than 100 aircraft targeted Kobona and Lednyovo. Yet only limited damage was caused, while ground-based flak batteries brought down 19 of the bombers. On the 29th another raid struck Osinevets but again produced only minor effects. Newly installed radars had helped Soviet fighters disrupt these attacks. After these disappointments, Luftwaffe focus shifted back to the frontline situation involving the Volkhov group of forces. The sole exception involved 15 Bf 109s that were detached from JG 54 and sent to the Finnish airfield at Petäjärvi. Their mission was to attack Soviet barge traffic on Lake Ladoga. Despite flying 104 sorties, however, they failed to sink even one vessel. The inability of these Bf 109s to produce results typified a wider Luftwaffe problem: fighter aircraft were ill-suited for anti-shipping strikes against scattered small craft operating near their own shore-based flak defenses, and the expanding Soviet radar network was steadily eroding the surprise on which such interdiction missions relied.   Despite the German attempts, maritime traffic across Lake Ladoga continued to grow throughout the week as the ice disappeared. By the 28th the first convoy sailed from Novaia Ladoga to supply Leningrad. By December 1942 more than 200 ships would ply this supply route, transporting an estimated 779,586 tons of cargo. Half of that total would consist of foodstuffs. As Glantz records: “Of this cargo, 50 percent was foodstuffs, 15.4 percent coal, 16.7 percent lubricants, and 17.9 percent weaponry and other military cargoes. The foodstuffs primarily consisted of flour, grain, macaroni, butter, fat, meat, sugar, preserves, and chocolate. In addition, the city received 4,186 sheep and goats, 7,723 small cattle, 4,388 horses, 41,638 cubic meters of wood, 5,967 tons of various goods, and 1,300 tons of medical supplies.” Raw materials were also delivered to restart the military industry inside Leningrad. During the same period 310,000 combat replacements were shipped into the city, further transforming it into a fortress. At the same time 539,597 civilians and an additional 292,900 tons of factory equipment were evacuated from Leningrad. The opening of the lake route therefore marked a decisive change in Leningrad’s strategic situation. The city that had endured the most severe starvation of the winter—when daily rations had dropped to as little as 125 grams of bread for dependents—was gradually being reconnected to the rest of the Soviet war economy. The simultaneous evacuation of civilians and factory equipment alongside military resupply reflected a deliberate Soviet policy of adjusting Leningrad’s population to a level that could be fed and defended, while at the same time safeguarding the industrial capacity that had once made the city the second metropolis of the USSR.   After all the indications of a Soviet withdrawal that had appeared the previous week, on May 24th Küchler informed Lindemann that it would be extremely unfortunate to allow the Russians to slip away. Consequently the 18th Army was ordered to launch an offensive to stop the 2nd Shock Army from escaping. Responsibility for the attack fell to the 1st and 38th Army Corps, which together fielded 5 infantry divisions, 1 motorized division, and the 2nd SS Infantry Brigade. The weather, however, had other plans. The ground was far too saturated to support an offensive. After observing still more troops leaving the pocket on the 25th, Lindemann asked the commander of the 38th Corps, Haenicke, whether he could launch an attack with a clear conscience on the 27th provided he received air support. Haenicke initially consented, but the weather deteriorated again before the conversion was even finished. Only on the 30th did the rain finally ease and the ground dry sufficiently to permit an assault, although conditions remained extremely muddy. The delay proved agonizing from the German viewpoint: every hour that elapsed allowed more Soviet troops and equipment to filter through the narrow corridor, and Küchler was sharply aware that his opportunity to close the pocket permanently was shrinking. The Volkhov swamplands, which had already swallowed men and vehicles all winter, now worked against the very encirclement operation that the Germans had spent months preparing to carry out.   Despite the assault force suffering 30 percent casualties, the Erika route was cut that evening. During the night the two German corps linked up near the Erika lane, and by midday on the 31st they had established a firm cordon around the 2nd Shock Army with strong defenses oriented both east and west. As a result the 2nd Shock Army continued to starve inside its pocket and grew ever more dependent on eating the vegetation around them. In June, A. Baziuk wrote home: “We ate everything that could be eaten . . . [including] tree leaves and fir cones. We boiled old horse bones and gnawed on them. I say nothing about the bark—all the trees around us were stripped. Any insects, worms, and frogs were used as food. Birch sap was of great help, but, in the middle of May, it disappeared, and we suffered distressingly until the end of June.” Baziuk’s letter, along with others of its kind, conveyed the real character of the 2nd Shock Army’s suffering in a manner that operational maps and order-of-battle charts could never achieve. Vlasov’s army had entered the Volkhov swamps in January as a powerful offensive formation meant to relieve Leningrad. By late May it had been reduced to a band of starving men clinging to waterlogged forest clearings, no longer fighting for map objectives but simply struggling to remain alive long enough to be rescued.   After nearly a year of internal political maneuvering, Lavrenti Beria had failed in his bid to obtain exclusive authority over the Partisans. On the 30th the Communist Party established a Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement that reported directly to STAVKA.  Ponomarenko was named its chief, and regional partisan headquarters would be formed beneath this central command. The directive also spelled out six primary missions for the partisans: disrupting enemy supply and communications infrastructure, destroying enemy equipment stored in warehouses or on airfields, raiding enemy rear installations such as headquarters, and furnishing the Red Army with reconnaissance data. Although the senior leaders remained Communist Party members, the move signaled a transition toward greater Red Army oversight of the partisan effort. Additional Red Army and NKVD personnel were sent behind German lines to expand recruitment and supervise operations. The establishment of the Central Headquarters amounted in many respects to a belated recognition of what the partisan movement had already shown on its own: that occupied Soviet territory was not passively submitting to German rule. The main task ahead would be to convert hundreds of scattered, locally organized groups into a unified strategic tool capable of inflicting real operational damage on the Wehrmacht’s rear services. Ponomarenko himself was a party official rather than a military professional, yet the directive’s stress on Red Army and NKVD liaison officers indicated that military competence, not political loyalty alone, would now shape the movement’s future course.   Much like the German 16th Army, Kurochkin took advantage of the pause in combat to reorganize his units around Demyansk. The 27th Army was assigned to screen Staraya Russa, the 11th Army was positioned north of the Ramushevo Corridor, and the 1st Shock Army was placed to its south. The 34th and 53rd Armies continued to hold the ring around the Demyansk salient. STAVKA decided to grant the Northwestern Front time to restore its formations to full strength after months of exhausting combat. Its next major operation was provisionally scheduled for early July. By then the Front would have assembled more than 300,000 troops and would be strengthened by the 6th Air Army. The Demyansk pocket remained an unusual feature of the northern sector of the Eastern Front: a German force of roughly 100,000 men, isolated since February, that had refused to disintegrate despite Soviet pressure and was instead kept alive by a Luftwaffe airlift that placed heavy strain on German transport aircraft and established a risky precedent. Both sides had poured vast resources into the pocket—Germany to maintain it, the Soviet Union to eliminate it—without either side achieving a conclusive outcome. For STAVKA, the reduction of Demyansk before the summer campaigning season offered an appealing goal, yet the heavy cost of the winter fighting had made a fully prepared offensive impossible until the troops could be rested and brought back up to strength.   On the 24th, planning began in the Western and Kalinin Fronts to resume their offensives against Army Group Center. Once again the focus would be Rzhev. Halder recorded in his diary on the 24th and 26th that Soviet forces were concentrating in growing numbers in the Belyi area and concluded that an offensive there was probably imminent. The Rzhev salient—a westward bulge in the German line—had preoccupied the Soviets ever since the winter counteroffensive. Soviet commanders had correctly calculated that eliminating the salient would shorten the front, free up substantial forces, and push German supply lines farther away from Moscow. What they could not fully anticipate was the determination with which German troops, especially those of Model’s 9th Army, had turned the interior of the salient into a dense web of mutually supporting strongpoints, anti-tank ditches, and meticulously registered artillery kill zones.   Also on the 24th, beneath pouring dawn rain, German artillery signaled the beginning of Operation Hanover. Elements of six German divisions, supported by powerful Luftwaffe air cover, crashed into Kazankin’s Airborne Corps. The 6th Partisan Regiment at Vskhody was immediately overrun by the 19th Panzer Division, which also forced the 8th Cavalry Regiment backward. The Soviets did succeed, however, in destroying the bridge, thereby denying the Germans a crossing of the Ugra River at that point for several days. The Germans pushed northward to seize Selishche and Selibka in an effort to isolate the Airborne Corps from the Ugra River crossings. From the north the 197th Infantry Division marched five hours to reach Ugra station and the rail bridge spanning the river. The Germans had not anticipated capturing Ugra and Vskhody until the second day of the operation. Radio traffic believed to originate from Belov’s command post inside the emerging pocket appeared to show signs of panic. Only 16 km remained to close the ring completely. Kluge and Heinrici were already congratulating themselves and their soldiers on a brilliant success. Their confidence was understandable: on paper the operation had exceeded expectations, the Soviet forces seemed disorganized, and the encirclement looked only days from completion. What German intelligence had failed to appreciate was the extent to which Belov’s cavalry and Kazankin’s paratroopers had become seasoned survivors in the forests behind German lines, able to display a resilience and inventiveness that would frustrate German plans for weeks to come.   All along the front line the airborne troops were pushed back. Zhabo’s 1st Partisan Regiment was compelled to fall back to a new position between Nadezhada and Kombain after losing 60 percent of its strength. This created a gap more than 10 km wide in the airborne defensive line and also drove the partisans away from the Airborne Corps. The 8th Brigade was assaulted at the town of Bol’shaia Myshenka by 3,000 German infantry and 20 tanks. After suffering 20 percent casualties the Soviet infantry were forced northwest in disorder. One company, however, was completely cut off and fought to the last man.   During the day Belov had asked Zhukov for assistance from the 50th Army. He received only vague assurances that the Western Front would mount an offensive in early June. Therefore the sole remaining hope lay in withdrawing the Airborne Corps and linking the two groups together. Kazankin pulled back northwest during the night. His objective was the Ugra River crossing at Selibka so that he could join Belov. Yet the lead battalion of the 8th Brigade discovered a German company occupying the village that blocked the crossing. The Soviets possessed no proper bridging equipment for the 120-meter-wide river. Consequently the airborne troops had to use the dense forest for cover while they quietly reconnoitered the riverbank. Torrential rain had halted major German movements, even grounding their Storch reconnaissance aircraft. An improvised footbridge was also attempted using eight large pine trunks, but the structure repeatedly broke apart under the force of the river current. The Ugra, swollen by spring runoff, at that moment hindered the Germans as much as it hindered the Soviets—small comfort to exhausted paratroopers attempting to carry their wounded across a 120-meter torrent on makeshift pine-log rafts in the middle of the night.   Then on the 26th six small boats were discovered on the Soviet side of the river at the ferry landing in Pishchevo. A thin telephone cable was rigged as a guide wire, and these boats were laboriously employed to ferry the airborne troops across during the 26th and 27th. The continuing foul weather fortunately prevented the Luftwaffe from interfering with the crossings. As a result it was not until the 27th that the Germans resumed their advance to seize the entire Ugra River line. Their forward elements did not link up until nightfall on the 27th because of repeated counterattacks mounted by Belov’s Cavalry Corps. The 6th Guard Regiment, supported by two T-26 tanks, had driven the Germans back across the Ugra at Vskhody. Meanwhile the 3rd and 7th Regiments had hurried to Sorokino to secure that river crossing. German artillery nevertheless managed to fire on the final battalion while it was still crossing. One company was unable to get across and chose to conceal itself in the swamplands to the southeast. There it would remain until July 15th, when it finally rejoined the 50th Army near Zaitseva Gora. The rear-guard company was also isolated. It fought its way out of the encirclement and returned to the Airborne Corps by the 29th.   Back on the 26th Kazankin had ordered a withdrawal toward Podlipki through the woods near Selibka. Once regrouped there, the corps would push westward toward Pustoshka to link up with Belov. Official archival records noted his decision: “In light of the complete impossibility of penetrating in the direction of Fursovo, the corps commander decided: while exploiting the darkness on the night of 26–27 May to penetrate to the west between the villages of Selibka and Chashchi, enter the forest masses and subsequently withdraw in the direction of Pustoshka.” During the night of the 28th they succeeded in slipping past German strongpoints after dispersing a screen of security troops. By daybreak the corps was hidden in the forests around Selibka. The movement had been executed with such stealth that the German artillery barrage on the 28th fell on the camps abandoned the previous night rather than on the new position. By this stage Shmelev and Zhabo had also managed to bring the remnants of their partisan formations back into the Airborne Corps. It was here that Kazankin restored radio contact with both Belov and Zhukov and informed them of his situation. He also requested air support to protect his withdrawal. VVS airstrikes on the 29th enabled him to cross the Vskhody–Pustoshka road. It was during this period that a Major Bocharov betrayed the paratroopers and began supplying the Germans with information about the corps’ location.    During the march Captain Smirnov, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 9th Brigade, was wounded and captured by the Germans because of the treachery of this former Major Bocharov, who subsequently provided the Germans with information about Kazankin’s plans. As 4th Airborne’s official history noted, “Undoubtedly, he provided the enemy with information about the parachutists, and, from that day, tanks, infantry, artillery, and aviation uninterruptedly struck the corps throughout its 300-kilometer path of withdrawal.” Smirnov became a POW but later escaped to join first Polish and then Belorussian partisans. The Bocharov betrayal represented a serious setback but not a fatal one: Kazankin’s corps had already shown an exceptional ability to evade capture, and the forest and swamp terrain that made movement so physically punishing also furnished concealment that partly neutralized the intelligence edge Bocharov had given the Germans. The 300-kilometre withdrawal that now confronted the corps would rank among the most punishing episodes of the entire Soviet experience behind German lines on the Eastern Front.   During this period other German units had been attacking the 1st Guards Cavalry Corps from Dorogobuzh toward Vyazma, slowly forcing them southward. At this stage Belov’s forces consisted of the 1st Guards Cavalry Division, the 1st and 2nd Partisan Divisions, and seven tanks, including a heavy KV (model Klimenti Voroshilov) and a medium T-34. By the 28th Belov had stabilized his eastward front along the Ugra River. Halder recorded in his war diary that same day: “Fourth Army has closed the ring around the main body of Belov.” The following day both the 2nd Guards Cavalry Division and the 4th Airborne Corps had completed their reorganization and joined Belov’s forces. In addition the 23rd and 211th Airborne Brigades, totaling some 4,000 men, were ordered into the pocket to reinforce Belov. The 23rd Brigade arrived first, beginning on the 29th. For once the brigade landed accurately at its drop zone and brought supplies for six days. The decision to reinforce a force already surrounded behind enemy lines was a classically Stalinist gamble: instead of writing off Belov’s group as lost and preserving the airborne assets for future use, STAVKA poured additional manpower into the pocket in the hope that a large enough force could eventually break out. Whether this represented sound strategy or a refusal to accept reality remained open to debate.   Only 2,000 Soviets were taken prisoner and 1,500 killed during Operation Hanover. Belov and the great majority of his troops escaped the German trap with more than 17,000 men, 18 light tanks, 1 T-34, and 1 KV tank. Although he had been driven farther from safety and had lost the most operationally valuable ground, a second phase of Operation Hanover would be required to eliminate this pocket behind German lines. For Kluge and Heinrici the outcome was a major disappointment. The operation had scored tactical victories—overrunning partisan regiments, capturing key river crossings, pushing Belov southward—but had fallen short of its central goal of destroying the Soviet force. The forests of Army Group Center’s rear had absorbed Belov’s cavalry just as they had absorbed everything else that ventured too far into them.   On the 29th Army Group Center issued a top-secret directive to all its subordinate formations. Its opening sentence stated: “The OKH has ordered the earliest possible resumption of the attack on Moscow.” The document required that all subsequent communications concerning this operation be filed under the code name Kreml. In reality no such operational plan existed. It was a purely notional undertaking designed to mislead the Soviets. On paper it was a reworking of Operation Typhoon that assigned the same tasks to the two Panzer Armies of the Army Group. Security for the operation was deliberately kept tight, on the understanding that even the smallest leak would still reach Soviet ears. Operation Kreml was an ambitious exercise in strategic deception. German planners recognized that Soviet intelligence, despite being penetrated and disrupted, retained considerable capacity to gather information. By creating a detailed illusion of a renewed offensive against Moscow—complete with orders, unit assignments, and timetables—they hoped to pin Soviet reserves in place opposite Army Group Center while the real blow, Fall Blau, was prepared far to the south. The plan succeeded beyond all expectations: Soviet conviction that Germany’s main effort in 1942 would again be aimed at Moscow shaped their deployments and their interpretation of events in Ukraine throughout the spring and early summer.   In Germany, Herbert Backe had been appointed acting minister of food and agriculture on May 22nd, replacing Richard Darré. Backe had originally championed the Hunger Plan in 1941, which had called for the deliberate starvation of 30 million Soviet civilians by seizing all available grain and cutting Soviet cities off from food supplies. The plan had effectively been dropped as unworkable late in 1941. Soviet civilians had not simply waited passively to starve, and the Wehrmacht had concluded that actively blockading food from urban areas would require far too many troops. Yet by that time millions had already perished from hunger, directly or indirectly, chiefly among minority groups and prisoners of war.   Germany’s own food situation had deteriorated further by May 1942 because of poor harvests in 1940 and 1941 and the lack of imports from occupied territories. Grain reserves were almost exhausted. Rations for both civilians and the military had already been reduced in April amid widespread discontent. Germany was completely unable to feed the workers it had enslaved for its war economy. Göring had suggested that these workers could subsist on cat and horse meat. Backe performed the calculations and demonstrated that there were not enough cats to supply any meaningful quantity of meat. Moreover, horse meat was already being consumed by German civilians. The starving workers were so unproductive that the meager food they received was regarded by Backe as essentially wasted. Backe and Hitler therefore agreed—Hitler’s slogan being: “These consequences must be accepted, because before the German population starves in any way, others must . . . pay.” It was preferable to concentrate food on a small core of productive workers rather than distributing it to “useless eaters.” In addition there would be no further food shipments from the Reich to the Wehrmacht in the field. The Army was to obtain its own supplies locally without concern for the local population. Furthermore, Jews and all others the Nazis deemed undesirable were to be denied any rations whatsoever and removed from the food distribution system entirely. All other groups were to starve before the Germans did. Food was also to be imported into Germany from the General Government of Poland even though that territory could not feed its own population. Until then it had depended on food shipments from Germany simply to sustain its inhabitants. As Goebbels declared, Germany was digesting the occupied territories. The appointment of Backe—the architect of deliberate mass starvation as official policy—to oversee Germany’s food supply was not simply an administrative change. It marked the final institutionalization of the Nazi hierarchy of hunger: German civilians first, productive slave laborers a distant second, and all other subject peoples nowhere at all. The millions of Soviet prisoners of war who had already starved to death in German camps since 1941 were the most visible result of this logic, but the policy’s consequences extended to every corner of occupied Europe wherever German administrators decided who would eat and who would not.   In Ukraine, Bock’s counterattack the previous week had encircled the 6th and 57th Armies together with Group Bobkin. Now, day and night, fragmented Soviet formations that were short of fuel and ammunition hurled themselves against the thin line held by 3rd Panzer Corps. One attack nearly reached Novopokrovske but ran out of momentum 6 km short of safety. Continuous Luftwaffe airstrikes helped shatter the Soviet assaults.   This concentrated effort by the encircled Soviet forces against 3rd Panzer Corps was closely followed by advancing German formations. As a result, by the 26th the Soviet pocket had been compressed to only 16 km by 3 km, centered on the Bereka valley. From a hilltop near Lozovenka, Bock could survey most of the pocket. The scene that met his eyes represented one of the most total annihilations of a major Soviet force yet seen in the war: tens of thousands of men crammed into a strip of ground barely wider than the effective range of artillery, their vehicles immobilized for lack of fuel, their ammunition nearly gone, with no hope of relief from outside and the Luftwaffe overhead denying them rest even at night. The 17th Army noted in its war diary, with surprise, that no relief operation was attempted from outside the pocket. After the unsuccessful efforts of the 38th Army on the 23rd near Chepil, it was not until the 28th that they managed to organize a fresh attack using two tank brigades. This advance met a German offensive aimed at crushing the 38th Army’s bridge over the Donets near Zhukovka. The two operations essentially canceled each other out, although Moskalenko claimed that his actions had enabled 22,000 Soviets to escape the encirclement. To put it politely, this represents a mild exaggeration both of the number who escaped and of his own contribution to their escape.   By the 28th the fighting had ended. Germany claimed to have captured 240,000 prisoners and seized 1,200 tanks and 2,600 artillery pieces. The Soviets officially recorded total losses of 266,927 men, 652 tanks, and 4,924 guns and mortars. Of these, 207,057 men were taken prisoner, 46,314 were sick or wounded, and only 13,556 were listed as dead. Glantz notes that modern estimates put the real total at 170,958 dead, missing, or captured, with an additional 106,232 wounded. Generals Kostenko, Bobkin, Podlas, and Gorodnyanskii all lay dead alongside thousands of their men. As devastating as this disaster was, it still did not equal the human losses suffered by Kozlov and Mekhlis in Crimea, although it did produce greater losses in modern tanks and other equipment.   German losses were estimated at 20,000 men and 108 tanks. The Luftwaffe reported losing only 49 aircraft while claiming 615 Soviet planes destroyed. While Soviet records confirm heavy aviation losses during the Second Battle of Kharkov, the Luftwaffe’s claims were undoubtedly inflated. For his part in the battle General Paulus became a favorite of the German press and was awarded the Knight’s Cross. For the Soviet officer corps, Kharkov represented a catastrophe whose repercussions reached far beyond the immediate loss of ground and equipment. The destruction of Timoshenko’s offensive capability at the precise moment when German forces were beginning to mass for Fall Blau left the southern sector of the Soviet front dangerously exposed. The armies that would have to oppose Germany’s drive toward the Caucasus and the Volga had been largely consumed in a failed offensive launched on the basis of faulty intelligence and unwarranted optimism.   On the 29th Timoshenko sent an assessment to Moscow warning that renewed German attacks against the South-Western Front could be expected within ten days. Thanks to Operation Kreml, both Timoshenko and STAVKA believed that Germany was about to launch a massive operation against Moscow, making everything happening in Ukraine secondary. Timoshenko was too frightened to approach Stalin directly, so he sent Khrushchev and Bagramyan to plead for reinforcements. Stalin proved less harsh than they had feared and dispatched 7 rifle divisions, 2 tank corps, and 4 tank brigades to bolster Timoshenko’s Front. According to Shtemenko, Stalin rebuked Timoshenko and Khrushchev with the words: “Battles must be won not with numbers but by skill. If you do not learn to direct your troops better, all the armaments the country can produce will not be enough for you.” Bagramyan, however, was made the immediate scapegoat for the disaster and demoted to chief of staff of the 28th Army. Further punishments would follow once more information became available. Stalin’s comment, harsh as it was, contained a genuine strategic truth: the Red Army’s repeated practice of hurling mass against well-prepared German defenses without the necessary coordination, deception, and combined-arms tactics required to exploit any breakthroughs was the fundamental reason for disasters such as Kharkov, just as surely as German operational skill contributed to them. The lesson would eventually be absorbed, but only after enormous sacrifice. This unexpected triumph at Kharkov generated a fresh surge of optimism inside the German high command. Hitler declared that the speed and scale of the victory allowed “favorable inferences to be drawn with respect to the entire enemy situation.” As a result it was no longer necessary to adhere strictly to the Blau timetable. Instead it was more urgent to strike quickly at any exposed Soviet formations while they were still reeling from the shock.   Operation Wilhelm was to strike at the Vovchansk salient north of Kharkov. A new FRIDERICUS II offensive was also to be prepared in order to encircle and destroy the 9th and 38th Armies and then advance to the Oskol River line as a preliminary step for Fall Blau. The preparations for these two operations now made it possible to revive STOERFANG. Manstein was instructed to have his operation ready to begin by June 7th. Hitler also demanded that the 8th Air Corps be returned to Crimea before the fighting at Kharkov had even concluded. Not all of the air units would return, however, because of disagreements over how much air support would be required for the other planned operations. The sequence of planned operations—Wilhelm, FRIDERICUS II, then STOERFANG, then Blau—reflected Germany’s characteristic method of linking tactical successes together to set the stage for a larger strategic offensive. It was a technique that had worked brilliantly in 1941, but it rested on the assumption that the Red Army would continue to collapse under successive blows rather than absorbing them and regenerating.   On the 25th, efforts to evacuate civilians and non-combat personnel from Sevastopol were intensified in a final attempt to ease the food burden on the garrison. In addition, Petrov and Oktyabrsky’s forces had for months been shortchanged logistically by Kozlov, who had diverted nearly all supplies to his own units. With Kozlov now removed from the picture, an effort was made to revive the garrison. The Black Sea Fleet military council requested 15,000 replacements, 50 new Yak-1 fighters, additional fuel for the 3rd Special Aviation Group to sustain a high sortie rate, and three times the previous allocation of ammunition for the Sevastopol Defensive Region. Petrov further asked for 10,000 rifles and 1,500 light machine guns to rearm his inadequately equipped troops. On the 28th a supply convoy delivered 3,017 replacements—all survivors of the Kerch campaign, most of whom had only recently returned to duty after recovering from wounds.   Oktyabrsky had assigned two cruisers, six destroyers, and eight minesweepers to conduct these final supply runs in May and June. All except the old Krasny Krym were capable of 30 knots, making them extremely difficult targets for air attack. The destroyers, however, could carry at most 400 troops per run, and the cruisers up to 2,000 troops each. They were also poorly suited for transporting heavy cargo. Consequently three cargo ships and a tanker were also detailed to carry supplies to Sevastopol. These vessels, however, could manage only 12 knots at best, rendering them far more vulnerable to air attack. Moreover, the faster warships were tied down escorting them. Even worse, only the cruiser Molotov possessed any air-search radar, and it was of a very primitive type. Most of the warships also relied on obsolete, slow-firing single-mount 21-K anti-aircraft guns. The basic dilemma of Sevastopol’s resupply was one that offered no satisfactory solution: fast warships could survive the gauntlet of air attacks but could carry little; slow cargo vessels could carry a great deal but were highly vulnerable to the Luftwaffe’s Ju-88s operating at short range from Crimean airfields. The garrison’s survival therefore depended on a logistical balance that became steadily more unfavorable with each passing week as German forces tightened the land perimeter and Manstein prepared the deliberate, set-piece assault that would determine the fortress’s fate.   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals [http://www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals]. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. Germany launched  a strategic deception, “Operation Kreml,” to convince the USSR Germany would attack Moscow, fixing Soviet reserves while Fall Blau prepared. In Ukraine, Kharkov’s destruction shattered Soviet offensive capability. Meanwhile Nazi hunger policy tightened under Backe, and Sevastopol’s strained resupply in May–June worsened.

Eastern Front #51 Disaster at Donetz

Last time we spoke about the second battle of Kharkiv. In Crimea, German armored thrusts move through difficult mud, creating a narrow escape corridor but eventually completing the encirclement of the Soviet 51st Army by reaching the Sea of Azov. Soviet attempts to counterattack fail because the 47th Army is too weak and lacks tank or artillery support, while communications to available artillery regiments are severed, leaving them idle. Soviet air coordination is also paralyzed by missing orders. The 51st Army surrenders, and many troops rout toward Kerch, where intense air attacks sink transport vessels and firebomb Kerch to hinder evacuation. As Soviet forces evacuate, a notable holdout forms in the Adzhimushkay Quarry, lasting 170 days despite shortages. Meanwhile, the Soviet offensive around Kharkiv initially breaks through German lines quickly and uses tank-heavy pressure. However, German counterattacks, air disruption, and, crucially, Soviet failure to commit reserves and mobile armor on time cause the breakthrough to stall. This episode is Disaster at Donetz Well hello there, welcome to the Eastern Front week by week podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about world war two? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on world war two and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel you can find a few videos all the way from the Opium Wars of the 1800’s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.    Last week Timoshenko launched his Southwestern Front into a daring offensive that had at first shaken the German 6th Army, creating deep breakthroughs that endangered the entire southern sector of the Eastern Front and possibly allowed the recapture of the key city of Kharkov. Now, this week, the German preparations to respond to Timoshenko—long in the planning and using carefully conserved reserves from Army Group South—were at last prepared to be released in a crushing counterstrike. In the far north, the occasional fighting in Finland and the Arctic theater once more started to quiet down, although this pause came at the high price of intensifying the already tense relations between Germany and its Finnish co-belligerent. Meanwhile, both Germany and the USSR kept up their urgent race against time and the elements to get ready for fresh large-scale battles around the vital axes of Moscow and Leningrad, where winter counteroffensives had left both sides exhausted but without resolution.  In Finland, the 3rd Corps’ counterattack near Kestenga stayed hopelessly bogged down amid the lingering effects of the spring rasputitsa, the seasonal thaw that turned roads and fields into quagmires of knee-deep mud. Three Finnish regiments had tried a flanking movement against the solidly entrenched Soviet positions, but the impassable terrain made any outflanking impossible, forcing the Germans to commit their own units to expensive frontal assaults in an effort to break the Soviet lines head-on. This grinding combat continued until May 21st, when the Soviets finally began an orderly withdrawal under pressure. Following closely behind them, elements of the 3rd Corps succeeded in regaining most of their original lines by the 23rd. At that point, however, General Siilasvuo ordered an immediate stop to further advances, even though this went against orders from General Dietl and left German and Finnish forces short of occupying the most favorable local defensive terrain in the surrounding hills and forests. Deeply worried that issuing a public rebuke might push the Finns toward abandoning the partnership altogether, Dietl reluctantly let Siilasvuo’s orders remain in place. Privately, though, Dietl acted to limit Siilasvuo’s authority to pull troops from the frontline, hoping to keep tighter operational control over future actions.   This relatively minor battle only served to further inflame the growing tensions between Finland and Germany that had been building since the previous autumn. Many German officers on the ground increasingly felt they were being forced to carry the bulk of the heavy lifting in what was supposed to be a joint partnership, with Finnish units often holding back from decisive engagements. The German liaison officer embedded with the 3rd Corps complained directly to Dietl that German troops had carried out virtually all of the intensive offensive operations within the corps since May 15th. Indeed, the Army of Lapland War Diary entry for May 23rd captured the broader German frustration in explicit terms: “In the course of the recent weeks the army has received the growing impression that the Commanding General, III Corps, either on his own initiative or on instructions from higher Finnish authorities, is avoiding all decisions that could involve Finnish troops in serious fighting.” This friction was symptomatic of a deeper and longstanding political reality: Finnish Commander-in-Chief Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim had never fully embraced Germany’s expansive strategic ambitions for the far north. As early as the autumn of 1941, he had made clear to his own government that Finland’s war aims remained strictly defensive and limited in scope. As Mannerheim later reflected candidly in his memoirs, Finland was “a co-belligerent, not an ally”—a subtle but vital distinction that the Germans found increasingly maddening and unsustainable as the grueling Arctic campaign dragged on without decisive progress.   By May 22nd the ice covering Lake Ladoga had finally melted enough to restore full nautical navigation after the long winter freeze. The steamer Gidrotekhnik, towing several heavily laden barges, became the first vessel to complete the critical supply run from Kobona on the eastern shore to Osinovets on the western side, delivering desperately needed food, fuel, and ammunition directly into besieged Leningrad. In its wake, a growing flotilla of additional vessels rapidly began to follow, reopening the vital “Road of Life” naval route that would sustain the city through the coming months of renewed German pressure.   Near Leningrad itself, the fighting flared up once again in the Lyuban salient as Soviet forces trapped there made a final, desperate bid for survival. After an entire week wasted in high-level debates over the precise details of their withdrawal plan, the encircled troops of the 2nd Shock Army finally attempted to escape their suffocating pocket. Yet instead of the orderly, phased withdrawal that Khozin and STAVKA had envisioned, the operation quickly devolved into chaotic and haphazard skirmishes across the swampy, forested terrain. The 2nd Shock Army had already suffered catastrophic losses, with 60 to 70 percent of its strength eroded by relentless combat, desertions, and the slow toll of starvation as food supplies dwindled to almost nothing. Command and control had collapsed to such an extent that entire Soviet formations began fragmenting into disorganized groups of survivors. Those units closest to the outer edges of the pocket surged eastward in a frantic bid to reach the safety of the Volkhov River, often abandoning equipment and wounded in the process.   Nevertheless, enough organized elements of the army still held together to maintain a viable perimeter, enabling them to beat back several probing German attacks. These German probes had been launched precisely because of the rising tide of Soviet deserters, who painted a picture of an army on the brink of total collapse. The deserters also confirmed that a general withdrawal was underway, a suspicion reinforced when German observers spotted large-scale troop movements exiting the corridor on May 21st and 22nd. Radio traffic interruptions further convinced the Germans that General Vlasov was relocating his command post. Vlasov himself later painted a harrowing picture of his army’s plight in a radio message to Leningrad Front headquarters, reporting that his men were reduced to “eating tree bark and leather” while ammunition stocks hovered near exhaustion. Appeals for emergency food drops and reinforcements went largely unheeded, as the logistical nightmare far exceeded the limited capacity of Soviet aviation to deliver meaningful aid under heavy German fighter cover.   Meanwhile, the parallel offensive by the neighboring 59th Army, intended to link up with and relieve the 2nd Shock Army, also ended in failure. Its divisions were woefully understrength, hampered by chronic shortages of artillery and tank support that left them unable to punch through determined German defenses. Compounding the problem, the narrow corridor formed a vulnerable junction between three separate Soviet armies that proved incapable of effective cooperation, with each headquarters operating in isolation and failing to synchronize efforts. On May 21st, STAVKA issued urgent demands for the 2nd Shock Army to break out, accompanied by sweeping new orders for the entire Leningrad Front. These were formally codified as Stavka VGK directive no. 170406, addressed to the Leningrad Front commander and outlining the missions and reorganization of the Volkhov Group of Forces. The 8th, 54th, and 52nd Armies were instructed to remain strictly on the defensive, while the Front as a whole was tasked with clearing the Kirishi and Gruzino regions by June 1st. The 2nd Shock Army itself was ordered to withdraw, simultaneously eliminating the dangerous Spasskaia Polist’ bulge in coordination with the 59th Army. Once these immediate objectives were secured, the Volkhov grouping was to transition fully to the defensive along the entire line from Lake Ladoga to Novgorod. As part of the broader restructuring, the Volkhov grouping would be split into two distinct commands: the 54th and 8th Armies would form the new Ladoga group, while the 4th, 59th, 52nd, and 2nd Shock Armies would continue as the Volkhov Group proper. This reorganization reflected STAVKA’s growing recognition that fragmented command structures had contributed heavily to the recent disasters.   STAVKA went further, issuing detailed orders for the extensive improvement of fortifications held by the 54th, 8th, and 52nd Armies. It was deemed necessary to spell out even the most basic principles—such as constructing defenses in depth with mutually supporting lines of fire—because previous efforts had proven woefully inadequate. All positions were to be meticulously camouflaged, with special emphasis placed on defending population centers, key terrain features, and vital road junctions through dense networks of minefields and obstacles. Displaying an extraordinary degree of distrust in the local commanders’ competence, STAVKA explicitly required that minefield locations be carefully recorded on maps and reported upward. To bolster these efforts, heavy reinforcements were promised to begin arriving by mid-June, signaling Moscow’s determination to stabilize the northern theater before the Germans could renew their drive on Leningrad.   Last week had seen the dramatic opening of Timoshenko’s Kharkov offensive, which achieved early successes with a 56-kilometer-wide and 25-kilometer-deep advance that briefly threatened to unhinge the German southern flank. However, the northern prong had already stalled due to the unexpectedly swift commitment of German reserves, far earlier than Soviet intelligence had anticipated. The 38th Army found itself under ferocious combined-arms assaults from panzer units and the Luftwaffe, ultimately driven back to the defensive river line near Velyka Babka. There, a brutal war of attrition unfolded, rapidly drawing in six of the eight available Soviet tank brigades in the sector and consuming precious reserves of fuel and ammunition. Meanwhile, the 28th Army had made painfully slow progress against a network of stubborn German village strongpoints, such as Ternova, which continued to be resupplied by Luftwaffe airdrops even after being bypassed. These localized fights had devoured a disproportionate share of the Southwestern Front’s logistical capacity and VVS air support, leaving the intended Mobile Group—meant to exploit any breakthroughs—idling uselessly some 20 kilometers behind the frontline, unable to capitalize on fleeting opportunities.   This pattern of intense, seesaw fighting carried over into the current week, with both sides launching repeated attacks and counterattacks across the muddy terrain. On May 17th, for instance, a coordinated German push by elements of the 71st and 168th Infantry Divisions, backed by the 3rd and 23rd Panzer Divisions, overwhelmed the Soviet 244th Rifle Division, forcing it to retreat alongside the neighboring 168th. The action not only relieved the long-besieged garrison at Ternova but also compelled a minor withdrawal by the 38th Army to safeguard its exposed flank. German panzers attempted to exploit the breakthrough, only to be halted cold by the determined stand of the 13th Guards Division on the 38th Army’s wing. It was during this very engagement that the first Order of the Patriotic War 1st Class was awarded—to Artillery Captain Krikly, whose battalion was credited with destroying 34 enemy tanks and blunting the entire German assault. Krikly himself was gravely wounded, and the vast majority of his gunners became casualties, yet the 13th Guards Division as a whole claimed to have accounted for over 100 panzers across its defensive actions in the sector. Timely Soviet reinforcements eventually allowed the line to be stabilized between Pylna and Grafovka, prompting the 21st Army to be shifted onto the defensive. By the end of May 17th, only the 28th Army continued pressing the northern attack. That same evening, however, developments farther south forced Timoshenko to order both the 28th and 38th Armies back onto the offensive. The goal was to tie down the two German panzer divisions in the area and distract enemy reinforcements from the more critical southern sector. In reality, neither army possessed the strength to exert any meaningful influence on events unfolding to the south, highlighting the growing strain on Soviet command and resources.   Meanwhile, Golikov’s Bryansk Front saw its own supporting offensive formally cancelled on May 17th. General Bodin personally delivered the new directives to headquarters: the 40th Army was to launch an immediate attack, backed by the full weight of the Front’s VVS air assets, in order to relieve pressure on Timoshenko’s hard-pressed forces. Yet the 40th Army was nowhere near ready, plagued by incomplete mobilization and supply shortages. Despite Golikov traveling personally to the army headquarters to accelerate preparations, the attack came too late to matter. Bagramian would later lament this missed opportunity in his postwar writings, noting that the Front’s formidable strength—ten rifle divisions, eleven rifle brigades, and more than 300 tanks—could have dramatically altered the course of the entire Kharkov battle had it been committed in time.   Farther south, the Southern Shock Group had enjoyed greater initial success, carving out a penetration 40 kilometers deep across a 55-kilometer-wide front. Soviet spearheads reached the outskirts of Berestyn, and bridgeheads were secured across the Berestova River. These gains, however, had begun to exact a heavy toll on the assault formations, which had still not achieved the objectives originally projected for completion by May 15th. Ammunition shortages grew acute for the attackers, especially for Group Bobkin, which operated more than 190 kilometers from its nearest supply bases. By stark contrast, the German defenders—pushed back onto their own well-stocked depots around Berestyn—enjoyed virtually unlimited resupply. The second wave of Soviet forces remained uncommitted, held idle 20 to 42 kilometers behind the front, awaiting the elusive moment to exploit a breakthrough that never fully materialized. Soviet intelligence initially believed that all local German reserves had already been committed, but reconnaissance soon revealed columns of reinforcements rushing toward Kharkov from as far afield as Belgorod and even Rostov. The Germans could move these forces freely thanks to the relative passivity of neighboring Soviet fronts. In addition, Army Group South was hurriedly feeding various German police, security, and auxiliary formations—including Romanian and Hungarian units—directly into the frontline to plug gaps and buy time for the panzers. The German counteroffensive, launched by Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army as the southern pincer of Operation Fridericus, caught everyone by surprise. The Soviets had not anticipated any major enemy action from this direction, and somehow the 9th Army failed to detect the sudden arrival of three additional infantry divisions and an extra panzer division massed directly in front of its positions. For their part, the Germans had not expected the Soviet 9th Army to disintegrate so rapidly upon contact. Field Marshal von Bock had come close to cancelling Kleist’s offensive altogether, fearing phantom Soviet reserves west of the Donets River might trap the assault forces. Instead, Bock proposed an impractical alternative that would have required Kleist’s troops to somehow “teleport” across vast distances to threaten Dnipro and Poltava. Supported by both Kleist and Paulus, Hitler intervened decisively, overruling Bock and insisting that the original Fridericus plan be executed without deviation.   In practice, the German assault forces steamrolled most of the Soviet defenders, though isolated pockets mounted stubborn resistance. The Barvinkove garrison initially repelled the first German attacks but was forced to surrender later that day once the town was fully encircled. The 5th Cavalry Corps succeeded in holding Dovhenke despite receiving no orders, while the 333rd and 51st Rifle Divisions managed to retain control of key Donets River crossings. By nightfall on May 17th, the 3rd Panzer Corps had advanced an impressive 24 kilometers, with the supporting infantry of the 16th Army covering 27 kilometers in the same period.   In his memoirs, Bagramian would later complain bitterly about the Southern Front’s failures, describing Malinovskiy’s handling of reserves as “incomprehensible” and accusing the front of effectively handing the Germans an open flank on a silver platter. He wrote: “We had counted on the Southern Front to hold firm. Instead, within hours of Kleist’s blow, that flank had ceased to exist as a coherent defensive force.” Bagramian faulted Malinovskiy for squandering reserves earlier in unordered and unauthorized attacks—such as the recent fiasco against Mayaky—and for failing to entrench forces properly in anticipation of a German counterstroke. Those same reserves had been earmarked in Bagramian’s planning to repel any penetration of the 9th Army. Malinovskiy did manage to dispatch the 296th Rifle Division and 3rd Tank Brigade to shore up the Pisky-Radkivski crossing, and he officially transferred the battered 5th Cavalry Corps to the 9th Army, retroactively endorsing their earlier independent actions.   Yet the sheer speed of the German advance quickly overwhelmed Soviet command structures. By the end of May 17th, Malinovskiy had lost contact with both the 9th Army headquarters and the committed reserves. Compounding the disaster, the 9th and 57th Armies had been deployed in a single, shallow defensive echelon only about four kilometers deep, with no meaningful divisional reserves held back. Fortification work had been neglected, leaving both armies dangerously exposed. Readiness levels remained low due to staff negligence, and the Southern Front’s VVS contributed almost nothing—managing just 62 sorties on May 17th against more than 2,000 flown by the Luftwaffe, which dominated the skies and hammered Soviet columns relentlessly. Because several high-profile figures from the Southwestern Front—including the future Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev—were directly involved, the precise details of the Soviet high command’s response remain clouded by postwar political disputes and attempted cover-ups. Contemporary evidence suggests, however, that both STAVKA and the Southwestern Direction commands initially viewed the German threat as manageable and easily containable through local reserves. Timoshenko directed the 23rd Tank Corps toward the 56th Army’s sector with orders to counterattack toward Barvinkove by May 18th. STAVKA released two rifle divisions and two tank brigades to reinforce the collapsing 9th Army, though these units would require three full days to reach the battlefield. Internal debates raged over whether the 6th Army should halt its own offensive to free up strength for a counterblow against Kleist, but Timoshenko and his staff remained confident they could contain the German thrust while pressing onward toward Kharkov.   Consequently, on May 18th the Soviet Sixth Army pressed its attack forward. In several sectors, tanks achieved local breakthroughs, yet every penetration was swiftly sealed off by aggressive German counterattacks, leaving the frontline essentially unchanged from dawn. At the same time, the 9th Army continued its rapid collapse, with panic beginning to infect the neighboring 56th Army. Neither formation mounted a coherent defense, allowing German forces to reach the Donets River north of Izyum with alarming ease.   In the years after the war, Khrushchev and Bagramyan would insist they had urged an immediate halt to the 6th Army’s offensive once Kleist’s threat became clear, claiming that Stalin, Vasilevskiy, and Timoshenko stubbornly refused to alter course. Khrushchev’s memoirs recount a personal telephone call to Stalin on May 18th in which he pleaded for cancellation, only to be told curtly, “The offensive must proceed. Timoshenko reports the situation is under control.” Khrushchev claimed he felt “sick with dread” upon hanging up. Vasilevskiy maintained that he too had tried to warn Stalin directly, receiving the reply, “Do not panic. Trust the Front commanders.” Yet Zhukov offered a sharply contradictory account in his own memoirs, Reminiscences and Reflections, asserting he had been present for the conversations and heard no such alarms from Khrushchev or Bagramyan. Archival records of contemporaneous reports and radio messages strongly support Zhukov’s version, suggesting the postwar claims were crafted largely to shield personal reputations after the disaster.   Meanwhile, Bock and Kleist grew increasingly uneasy, worried they might be walking into a Soviet trap because of the puzzling absence of any meaningful enemy reaction. Their original intent had been merely to draw Soviet forces away from the beleaguered German 6th Army, yet the Soviets appeared to ignore the threat entirely. Bock confided to his diary on May 18th: “Kleist’s advance is proceeding almost too smoothly. The enemy does not react. I cannot escape the feeling that we are missing something—that reserves are being withheld and will fall upon us suddenly.” The next phase called for the 3rd Panzer Corps to wheel westward along the south bank of the Bereka River—a maneuver less immediately dangerous than the northern thrust the Soviets had already overlooked. Kleist therefore proposed a cautious crossing of the Bereka to preserve the option of a northward drive should the enemy continue to ignore the westward shift. On May 19th the 14th Panzer Division seized a small bridgehead at Petrovskoye, narrowing the Izyum neck to just 24 kilometers and denying the Soviets one of their few usable Donets crossings.   Throughout May 19th, the German 8th Corps noted that Soviet attacks against its positions were growing steadily weaker and more disorganized. Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights reported large Soviet formations shifting southeastward, away from the 8th Corps. Acting on his own authority, Timoshenko finally ordered a full cessation of the offensive that evening. The German Sixth Army promptly reported: “The enemy’s offensive strength has cracked. The breakthrough to Kharkov is therewith prevented.” Timoshenko then redirected the 6th Army and Group Bobkin against Kleist’s forces and angrily demanded that Riabyshev destroy the Germans in his sector to free up units for the new crisis. Initial Soviet successes on May 20th were quickly erased by counterattacks from the two German panzer divisions. The newly arrived 88th Infantry Division captured portions of Murom, but the gain was not exploited because more promising opportunities beckoned elsewhere.   On May 19th, both Bock and Hitler recognized the dramatic shift in momentum and agreed to press on to the original goal of Operation Fridericus: a complete encirclement. Kleist was ordered to race northward to link up with the 6th Army near Balakliia, trapping every Soviet unit inside the salient. Bock instructed the panzers to attack at once following his conversation with Hitler. The next Donets crossing at Protopopivka was to be seized “under all circumstances and as soon as in any way possible.” It fell early on May 20th, though the 14th Panzer Division was left holding only a narrow 13-kilometer-deep by 2-kilometer-wide corridor. The main body of the 3rd Panzer Corps, which had been pushing westward to crush the 57th Army as far west as possible, was forced to reverse course. German commanders harbored deep misgivings about the reliability of the Romanian divisions anchoring the western sector—misgivings heightened when one Romanian division commander abruptly took leave upon learning of the impending offensive. Consequently, the 3rd Panzer Corps executed a grueling night march to reinforce the vulnerable 14th Panzer bridgehead. Simultaneously, Bock pressed the cautious Paulus to launch a southward attack with the 3rd and 23rd Panzer Divisions as the northern arm of Fridericus. Paulus, ever methodical, required personal insistence from Bock before committing his armor. That night Bock recorded in his diary with palpable relief: “…tonight, I have given orders aimed at completely sealing off the Izyum bulge. Now everything will turn out well after all!”   Over the following days the German panzers methodically ground forward through stubborn resistance. By May 23rd the 23rd and 16th Panzer Divisions linked up 16 kilometers west of Balakliia, establishing a 16-kilometer-wide barrier that severed the Soviet forces inside the salient from safety. The 6th and 57th Armies, together with Group Bobkin, were now fully encircled. All were critically short of fuel and ammunition after two weeks of nonstop combat. General Kostenko was rushed forward to assume overall command of the trapped Soviet troops in the Izyum pocket. The outcome was catastrophic. When Timoshenko attempted to explain the disaster to Stalin, he reportedly admitted that the speed of Kleist’s northward pivot had been “unexpected” and that the Southern Front’s collapse had rendered any organized response impossible. Stalin’s reaction, according to those present at Stavka, was one of icy fury. After a long, ominous silence following the encirclement report, he simply stated: “See to it that they break out. That is all.” The terse order concealed neither his rage nor any promise of mercy. To the south, General Kurochkin abandoned his 17-day offensive aimed at crushing the Ramushevo corridor on May 20th. The operation had achieved little beyond inflicting heavy losses on the attacking Soviet divisions and causing temporary supply disruptions to the German 2nd Corps around Demyansk. The frontline stabilized along the Lovat River. After-action reports cited the failure on inexperience in reducing large encircled forces, a persistent underestimation of German defensive capabilities, and repeated misreading of enemy intentions. They also highlighted the chronic Soviet failure to fortify junctions between cooperating armies—a vulnerability the Germans had exploited since the opening days of the war. With Soviet offensives in the north seemingly exhausted for the moment, the German 2nd Corps turned its attention to rebuilding its depleted ranks and stockpiles. It also focused on subduing the local civilian population and partisan bands, whose resistance had been inflamed by earlier Soviet paratrooper infiltrations. General Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt ordered the civilian population to harvest crops within the occupied salient for German use, while the 10th Corps pressed locals into forced labor to repair the Staraya Russa–Demyansk road and construct bunkers and shelters along the frontline.   At the same time, the 16th Army directed the laying of a narrow-gauge railway from Staraya Russa toward the Pola River to improve logistics. Soviet artillery dominance over the narrow Ramushevo Corridor prevented its extension all the way to Demyansk. Group Zorn retained responsibility for defending the corridor itself, now under the command of General Knobelsdorff. Engineers worked feverishly to fortify positions across the entire 16th Army front; in front of the 123rd Infantry Division alone, more than 22,000 mines and 400 rolls of barbed wire were emplaced to create an impregnable defensive belt. Behind the lines of Army Group Center, Operation Hannover—the planned reduction of Soviet partisan forces and encircled units in the rear areas—was postponed once again by heavy rains that once more turned the ground into thick, impassable mud. Despite persistent rain clouds still blanketing the region on May 23rd, General Heinrici ordered the offensive to commence on the 24th anyway, determined not to forfeit the element of surprise.   The delay had given the Abwehr time to attempt its own elaborate deception. Since late 1941 the German military intelligence service had been training turned Soviet prisoners of war as diversionist agents. Some 350 of these agents, organized as the Experimental Organization Center, were assigned to Army Group Center for Operation Hannover. They were infiltrated gradually into the operational area of General Belov’s cavalry corps with orders to assassinate Belov and his staff and sow confusion by issuing false orders and disinformation to Red Army units.   The plan backfired spectacularly. One of the agents deserted back to the Soviet side, providing Belov with precise advanced warning of the German offensive. This intelligence allowed the majority of the diversionists to be hunted down and eliminated. Belov later recalled that the deserter’s information was startlingly detailed—he could name German assembly points and even the approximate date of the attack. “It was,” Belov wrote, “as if the Germans had sent us their operational orders by courier.” By May 21st Belov was fully aware that the Germans were forming into two assault groups. While subordinate commander Kazankin saw to it that his own formation dug in along the designated line, he neglected to secure the critical Ugra River crossing or coordinate a joint defense plan with Belov.   This oversight occurred despite Kazankin’s forces having been officially subordinated to the newly created “Special Group of General Belov,” established by Zhukov on May 20th. The special group granted Belov unified command over his cavalry corps, airborne detachments, and all partisans operating in the region. A planned airlift to reinforce the grouping had also been organized, but poor staff work and organizational chaos hindered the effort despite sharp reprimands from Zhukov. Only 1,663 of the intended 9,000 reinforcements arrived, and only a tiny fraction of planned equipment deliveries materialized, leaving Belov’s forces critically understrength for the coming fight.   It was also during this week that the first of the Germans’ super-heavy artillery pieces began arriving in the vicinity of Sevastopol, although even after delivery many would require weeks before becoming fully operational. The colossal Dora railway gun, for example, would need six weeks and its 2,000-man crew to assemble after its scheduled arrival on May 26th. General Erich von Manstein, the meticulous commander overseeing the siege artillery preparations for 11th Army, approached the task with characteristic thoroughness. In his postwar memoirs Lost Victories he emphasized that the reduction of Sevastopol demanded “the most careful coordination of all arms,” adding that he harbored no illusions about the difficulty: “The fortress was one of the strongest in the world. Its garrison was brave and its commanders determined. We could not afford a single mistake in the sequence of the attack.” Eventually more than twenty different calibers of artillery would be concentrated before Sevastopol, creating minor logistical bottlenecks. The Dora arrived with a mere 48 rounds, while the three Karl-Gerät mortars brought only 122 shells between them. Much of the actual German firepower would come instead from more reliable Czech-manufactured pieces—sixteen 30.5 cm mortars and sixteen 14.9 cm Škoda howitzers—precisely because abundant stocks of ammunition were available for these weapons. On May 19th the Sevastopol Defense Region received orders to complete its final defensive preparations in anticipation of an imminent German assault. Between January and May 1942, Soviet convoys had successfully delivered some 35,000 replacements while evacuating 9,000 wounded from Petrov’s Coastal Army. Petrov now commanded a force numbering between 106,000 and 188,000 men and women—106,000 representing combat-effective strength across eight full-strength divisions plus supporting brigades and regiments, while the higher figure included all rear-echelon and support personnel. The garrison possessed roughly 600 artillery pieces, though none matched the scale of the largest German siege guns. Thousands of civilians had already been evacuated from the city to reduce the burden on supplies. Meanwhile, the Crimean Front was officially disbanded, and the North Caucasus Theater was downgraded to Front status. It remained under Marshal Budenny, with explicit orders to safeguard Sevastopol at all costs and prevent any German or Romanian landing on the Taman Peninsula that might open a second front in the Caucasus. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals [http://www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals]. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. German panzers drive through weak Soviet defenses, supported by overwhelming Luftwaffe air power, while Soviet reserves are mishandled, poorly fortified, and too slow to arrive. Attempts to halt or redirect the offensive are tangled in command and political disputes, with later memoir conflicts over whether Stalin was warned in time. By late May, German forces seal the Izyum salient, encircling large Soviet formations including the 6th and 57th Armies and Group Bobkin. The trapped troops face catastrophic shortages and are ordered to break out.

Eastern front #50 The Second Battle of Kharkiv

Last time we spoke about operation Trappenjagd. During the initial amphibious landing, Soviet artillery sank thirteen assault boats, but German troops still seized key bunkers and rapidly expanded the bridgehead. Joint air and ground pressure pinned Soviet second-line units while German exploitation surged toward Kerch, despite delays from engineering work to build tank-capable bridges. In the Arctic near Zapadnaya Litsa, heavy snow and fortified German-Finnish positions helped stall Soviet flanking offensives that became overextended and vulnerable to counterattacks. Around Leningrad, industrial production ramped up and Lake Ladoga defenses were strengthened to protect the city’s lifeline. Elsewhere, the Soviets reorganized front commands after the Volkhov Front’s dissolution, while the Germans used deception measures (maskirovka) to conceal true strategic intentions and delay Soviet expectations of the coming campaign. This episode is the second battle of Kharkiv Well hello there, welcome to the Eastern Front week by week podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about world war two? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on world war two and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel you can find a few videos all the way from the Opium Wars of the 1800’s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.    Along the Arctic coastline, the weather around Zapadnaya Litsa had at last improved sufficiently to permit meaningful military activity. However, the operational picture had shifted considerably against the Soviets. The German reinforcements that had arrived during the prior week had fundamentally altered the balance of forces, rendering the 12th Naval Brigade too weak and too diminished to carry out its original flanking mission. Compounding this, sustained attention from Luftwaffe bombers had badly degraded the brigade's already fragile supply line stretching across the bay. That supply line had always been a precarious arrangement — the brigade had been operating at the extreme end of a logistical chain that crossed open water, a fragile lifeline under any circumstances, and one the Germans had targeted with growing ferocity once its function became clear to them. The cumulative effect of enemy air interdiction and dwindling manpower left the brigade in an untenable position. Rather than allow it to be ground down in place to no purpose, orders were issued on the 14th for the brigade to withdraw. The question of whether a larger Soviet landing force, committed two weeks earlier, might have produced a meaningfully different outcome remains a matter of open speculation. With that flanking threat extinguished, Mountain Corps Norway seized the initiative and launched a series of limited counter-attacks aimed at restoring the line along its entire front to the positions held before the Soviet offensive had begun. These German moves succeeded in forcing the Soviet 14th Army to abandon whatever offensive ambitions it had entertained. The reinforcement of a further rifle division the preceding week had done nothing of consequence — it had proven insufficient either to sustain an offensive push or to stiffen the defence against the renewed German pressure. The improving weather was also felt further south near Kestenga, where conditions had finally become tolerable enough for the Finnish 3rd Corps to execute the counter-attack it had been compelled to postpone. On the 15th, Finnish forces finally lunged forward — and ran directly into an extensive network of field fortifications that Soviet troops had thrown up with considerable urgency in the intervening time. The Finnish formations quickly found themselves mired, both literally and figuratively. The ground around Kestenga was profoundly inhospitable to the kind of fluid, fast-moving operations that had made Finland's forces so formidable during the Winter War. Dense forests and waterlogged, boggy terrain funnelled any advance along narrow and entirely predictable axes of approach, stripping the Finnish Army of the infiltration tactics that had historically been its greatest asset and reducing the engagement to a grinding attritional contest. By the end of the week, the attack had stalled completely, and the front near Kestenga had settled into an exhausted stalemate. Within the beleaguered city of Leningrad, the garrison commander brought a deeply alarming picture to official attention. The sanitation and clean-up measures undertaken over the previous two months had manifestly failed in their purpose. His report documented a sixfold increase in cases of dysentery and typhoid fever compared to April of 1941, and an almost incomprehensible twenty-five-fold increase in spotted typhus over the same baseline. As many as thirty percent of the city's population was afflicted with a serious lice infestation. The infrastructure underpinning basic sanitation had collapsed almost entirely: only seven percent of apartments retained running water, while just nine percent had functional access to the sewage system. Of the sixty-five public baths the city had once operated, fewer than half remained in any working order, and only six of the fourteen first aid posts were functional — all of them plagued by frequent and unpredictable interruptions to their service. The garrison commander did not merely catalogue these facts; he issued an urgent call for substantially improved medical provision for the civilian population, alongside a far more proactive strategy for identifying and containing outbreak centres. His underlying fear was specific and pointed: he was gravely concerned that any serious infectious outbreak spreading from the civilian population into the military garrison could degrade the city's defences at a moment when it could least afford such a blow. General Kabanov's warning was as much a military concern as a humanitarian one. The deteriorating situation surrounding the 2nd Shock Army continued to evolve throughout the week, though the overall picture at command level remained deeply and dangerously confused. By this point the army had been fighting inside the Lyuban pocket for months on end, its combat strength steadily eroded by unrelenting engagements, chronically inadequate resupply, and the simple physical punishment of operating in one of the most hostile stretches of terrain anywhere on the Eastern Front. The Volkhov swamplands, even in summer, were a miserable theatre of operations; in the spring thaw they became something close to impassable, with every track dissolving into quagmire and the movement of any supplies becoming a near-impossible task even in the absence of active German interference. STAVKA responded on the 14th, issuing Operational Directive No. 00120/op from the Leningrad Front commander to the commander of the 2nd Shock Army concerning the army's withdrawal. STAVKA's assessment was that the proposed defensive line would require no fewer than four divisions simply to hold, while doing nothing at all to secure the army's lines of communication. Stalin's directive ordered the 2nd Shock Army to assault the Priiutino and Spasskaia Polist' salient in concert with the 59th Army, and then to consolidate its position within the Spasskaia Polist' and Miasnoi Bor region, forming a coherent and solid defensive line together with the 52nd and 59th Armies. On the 15th, Khozin submitted a revised operational plan. As recorded in STAVKA VGK Directive No. 170379 concerning the withdrawal of the 2nd Shock Army, Khozin argued that the original STAVKA plan should be reframed as the first phase of a two-stage withdrawal. Its purpose in this formulation was to disengage safely from German contact and establish a new, compact, and defensible line. This would provide a secure foundation from which to concentrate forces for a subsequent offensive operation. It would also protect the only road suitable for a breakout. The second phase would see the 2nd Shock Army take up a new defensive line safeguarding the Leningrad highway, with the precise details of that phase dependent upon the successful conclusion of the first. STAVKA approved this plan on the 16th. This approval finally allowed Khozin to order Vlasov to attempt the breakout in coordination with a westward offensive by the 59th Army. Glantz records that on that single day alone, the 13th Cavalry Corps, two rifle brigades, three rifle divisions, and two tank brigades managed to fight their way through the narrow Miasnoi Bor corridor. Other sources, however, dispute this account, arguing that operational failures within the Leningrad Front substantially hampered the withdrawal and severely restricted the flow of troops through the corridor. Some accounts go so far as to suggest that no meaningful withdrawal of the 2nd Shock Army occurred until considerably later in the month — a claim that may carry some technical validity, given that not all forces trapped within the Lyuban pocket were formally organised under the 2nd Shock Army. A portion of those forces fell under the 59th and 52nd Armies, or directly under the Front's own command. During this same week, Field Marshal Kluge reached the conclusion that the 9th Army's Operation Nordpol was an undertaking that exceeded what was operationally achievable and resolved to cancel it. Nordpol had been conceived as a sweeping double envelopment of Soviet forces lodged within the Rzhev salient — a sound enough concept at the level of operational theory, but one that presupposed a degree of logistical and manpower surplus that Army Group Centre simply did not possess in the spring of 1942. It is highly probable that Kluge chose this particular moment to act precisely because Hitler's attention had been drawn entirely southward, consumed by the unfolding crises in Ukraine and Crimea. That distraction afforded Kluge somewhat greater latitude to exercise his own judgement without interference. In place of Nordpol, a considerably more restrained operation — Seydlitz — was selected. This was a smaller and more focused offensive, aimed at closing the thirty-kilometre gap between German positions at Olenino and Bely. That narrow corridor represented the sole remaining connection between the Soviet 39th Army and the 11th Cavalry Corps and the Kalinin Front, and through it flowed whatever supplies kept those forces alive in the field. The corridor itself was defended by troops drawn from the 22nd and 41st Armies. Of particular note was the 17th Guards Rifle Division, which had dug itself into the streets of the long-disputed town of Bely. Once the corridor was sealed, successive attacks were planned to compress and destroy the encircled forces. However, Kluge determined that Operation Hanover — then already in progress — should be brought to a rapid conclusion first, with the troops thus freed then being redirected to reinforce Operation Seydlitz. Further south, Kurochin's assault on the Ramnushevo corridor ground on throughout the week in precisely the same pattern that had defined the preceding one. The same positions were struck by the same predictable assaults, and the mud continued to slow all movement to barely a crawl. The narrow corridor at Ramnushevo had by this point acquired all the grim character of a killing ground. Both sides knew with near-perfect certainty where the Soviet attacks would fall, and the Germans had exploited every interval between assaults to deepen their field fortifications, lay additional wire obstacles, and pre-register their artillery on the most likely Soviet axes of approach. This preparation allowed German reserves to be shuttled with relative ease to each threatened point as the need arose, reinforcing a defensive position that was becoming progressively stronger. The week closed with the Soviet offensive having gained no significant ground. The Ramnushevo corridor stood as it had before: a narrow, blood-soaked stretch of contested terrain that illustrated in miniature the terrible difficulty of offensive operations in these conditions. Meanwhile, Field Marshal von Bock had resolved to take a calculated risk and unleash Operation Fridericus ahead of schedule. The potential payoff was considerable: a successful execution might rescue the German Sixth Army from its mounting difficulties and destroy several Soviet armies in the process. The downside was equally stark — failure would expose additional German formations to potential destruction at a moment when reserves were scarce. Bock's ability to act was further complicated by the fact that he no longer exercised command over all the formations theoretically available to him in Ukraine. A substantial portion of the newly arrived reinforcements remained under the direct control of OKH, and Bock was uncertain of their readiness or even, in some cases, their precise locations. Even setting aside these informational gaps, Hitler was deeply reluctant to release those formations to Bock's command for an offensive operation, preferring to conserve their strength for the summer campaign. The practical consequence was that Army Group Kleist would have to carry the weight of the operation with minimal resources. Kleist himself believed he could realistically accomplish only the southern half of the offensive, which would reduce the mouth of the Soviet salient by no more than thirty-six kilometres — a result that would not materially alter the situation for the Soviets trapped within it. Bock therefore adopted a tactic borrowed from Kluge's own playbook. He presented Hitler with two operational options. The first was Fridericus as originally conceived. The second was a more modest proposal: four divisions extracted from Kleist's lines and committed to a limited thrust across the rear of the southern Soviet penetration. Privately, Bock favoured the smaller, more prudent counter-thrust, but he knew Hitler's psychology intimately enough to predict with confidence what the presentation of two such options would produce. He explained his reasoning to his Chief of Staff with a kind of resigned clarity: "Now the Führer will order the big solution. The laurels will go to the Supreme Command and we will have to be content with what is left." Events bore him out entirely. Hitler not only ordered Fridericus but also promised that every available aircraft from Crimea would be redirected to support it. The 22nd Panzer Division and the bulk of remaining Luftwaffe support were accordingly stripped away from Manstein. Kleist received orders to attack at dawn on the 17th. Soviet forces had actually seized planning documents for Fridericus as early as the 13th, but the intelligence they contained was not relayed to Timoshenko until late on the 17th — by which point it was of severely diminished value. In Crimea, the German advance resumed late on the 10th. The operational tempo that Manstein had maintained during the opening days of Operation Trappenjagd had been exceptional — a pace of exploitation so swift that the Soviet command had been unable to process it coherently, let alone respond effectively. Manstein's priority was now to prevent any pause from allowing the Soviets to recover their composure. A thick fog had settled across the operational area, and although the Germans were prepared to push through the mud, it was judged prudent to wait for the fog to clear rather than risk disorientation among attacking formations. There was genuine anxiety that even a brief delay might allow Soviet forces to slip out of the trap, though in truth the same conditions that impeded the Germans were equally obstructive to the Soviets. The 22nd Panzer Division led the northern hook with the 28th Light Infantry following in support. The mud hampered the pace of the armoured advance considerably, and by nightfall a narrow corridor remained open along the coast through which some Soviet elements were attempting to escape. While the Panzers pushed forward, the 28th Light and the 50th Infantry Divisions manoeuvred to positions east and south of the 51st Army to tighten the encirclement. During the day a Soviet armoured counter-attack had been launched against the Panzer spearhead, but it was spotted and interdicted by the Luftwaffe before it could close with the German advance. With communications from Kozlov's Crimean Front reduced to sporadic fragments and a growing realisation at the higher levels that a catastrophe was developing, STAVKA ordered the 47th Army to counter-attack early on the 10th. What it had available, however, was barely adequate for the task: a handful of second-rate troops without tank support or artillery. The force was so weak it could barely reconstitute a coherent front line, let alone mount a meaningful counter-attack, and its attempts were effortlessly repulsed. Five STAVKA artillery regiments were theoretically available to support operations, but the communications links to them had been severed on the first day of the German offensive and had not been restored. Without direct orders, those regiments simply remained stationary and idle, contributing nothing to either the defence or the counter-attack. The Crimean VVS was similarly inert, paralysed by a complete absence of operational orders. On the 11th, the 22nd Panzer Division at last reached the Sea of Azov and completed the encirclement of the 51st Army. As Ziemke notes, the 22nd Panzer, 28th Light, and 50th Infantry Divisions were subsequently transferred to the 42nd Corps, which was charged with reducing the pocket. In their place, the relatively fresh 170th Infantry Division was assigned to the 30th Corps to reinforce Group Groddeck and the 132nd Infantry in clearing the remainder of the Kerch Peninsula. The 132nd was to advance along the Black Sea coastline retracing Groddeck's route, while the 170th secured the Sea of Azov coastline. With the 51st Army completely surrounded, Manstein ordered it crushed from all directions simultaneously. The pressure was overwhelming. Soviet command and control, both inside and outside the pocket, collapsed entirely. The 51st Army surrendered before the day was out. Those Soviet troops who had not been encircled dissolved into a mass rout, streaming toward what they hoped would be safety at Kerch. Panicked rumours had by this point spread so thoroughly about the weight of German forces already behind the Soviet defensive lines that any attempt to re-form along those lines was abandoned before it could be made. Thousands of retreating soldiers crowded onto the only paved road running from Parapach to Kerch, rendering themselves easy targets for Luftwaffe ground attack aircraft. The Soviet anti-aircraft units, however, remained intact and fought determinedly to provide cover for the rout. When Bomber Group 55 sought to press their advantage by flying lower for greater accuracy, they paid a price for the attempt — losing eight He-111 bombers to ground fire before pulling back. Group Groddeck continued its drive toward Kerch. The Sultanovka line was crossed without serious resistance early on the 10th. With that line breached, the last of the prepared Soviet defensive positions had been penetrated, and the only remaining objective was to reach Kerch itself before the Soviets could complete their evacuation. On the 11th, however, Group Groddeck was ambushed by the 11th NKVD Division just short of the city. Groddeck himself was wounded again in the engagement — though accounts of what became of him vary considerably. Manstein himself would later claim he died of those wounds, while the fact that Groddeck commanded an infantry division as late as 1943 makes this account difficult to accept at face value. Despite the initial shock of the ambush, the NKVD division soon began to fall back once its troops recognised they were facing tanks, artillery, and mounting air attack simultaneously. Even so, the delay proved consequential — it was sufficient to prevent the early seizure of the port facilities at Kerch. Kozlov, by this point, issued orders for the evacuation of what remained of the Crimean Front from Kerch, calling upon the Azov Flotilla and requisitioning eighty fishing vessels to provide whatever sealift capacity could be improvised. An aerial contest of considerable ferocity developed over the straits as the 8th Air Corps attempted to interdict the evacuation while the VVS fought to protect it. Three transport vessels carrying a combined total of nine hundred wounded were sunk, along with a number of gun and patrol boats and many of the requisitioned civilian craft. In addition to this interdiction campaign, Kerch itself was firebombed on the 12th to hinder Soviet withdrawal efforts. The Black Sea Fleet played an almost entirely peripheral role, contributing little beyond several inconsequential night-time bombardment missions near Feodosiya. It was during this evacuation that both the 22nd Panzer Division and a substantial portion of the 8th Air Corps were recalled to address the rapidly deteriorating situation in Ukraine — a diversion that proved bitterly frustrating to Richthofen, who had watched his VIII Air Corps come within reach of annihilating the entire Crimean Front. He would later lament: "One isn't sure whether to cry or curse," as he observed the surviving Soviet troops completing their passage to the Taman shore — soldiers who would, in time, be reconstituted and return to the fight. By the 13th, the main body of the 30th Corps had reached the Sultanovka line and engaged the Soviet rearguards. By the 14th, the 132nd and 170th Infantry Divisions had arrived at the western outskirts of Kerch. During this phase of the fighting, a notable incident occurred: one assault group from Infantry Regiment 391, accompanied by four assault guns, overextended its advance and was cut off. The group fought its way back to German lines, but all four assault guns were disabled and their crews wounded in the process. The following day, German forces fought through the port town and established batteries of 20mm and 88mm anti-aircraft guns along the piers to fire directly on Soviet evacuation vessels. With their planned embarkation points now cut off, Colonel Yagunov withdrew what remained of his force to the Adzhimushkay Quarry. The quarry offered natural shelter and a degree of defensibility that was unavailable in the open terrain around the port, though it also meant from the moment of withdrawal that those troops were operating without reliable access to water, food, or medical supplies. Somehow, they held out for one hundred and seventy days before being overcome — a siege that stands as one of the more remarkable episodes of Soviet resistance in the entire war, though one that has received comparatively little attention in either Soviet or Western historiography, largely overshadowed by the scale of the catastrophe surrounding it. The vast majority of the other Soviet holdouts in and around Kerch had been eliminated by May 20th. The scale of Soviet losses during this period was catastrophic. Forczyk records that somewhere between 37,000 and 73,000 Soviet personnel were evacuated from the Crimean Front to the Taman Peninsula, though one Soviet source advances the considerably less credible figure of 120,000 evacuated. An estimated twenty percent of those evacuated were wounded. The overwhelming majority of the Crimean Front's heavy equipment had been abandoned in the field, though some care had been taken to recover rocket launcher vehicles and a portion of the artillery. Citino estimates that 1,100 guns and 250 tanks were either abandoned or destroyed. Forczyk's accounting of casualties gives the Crimean Front 28,000 dead and 147,000 captured out of 250,000 troops engaged, with an additional 417 aircraft lost by the Crimean VVS. In exchange, Manstein's 11th Army suffered a total of 7,588 casualties during Operation Trappenjagd. The 6,230 tons of ammunition expended would require two weeks to replenish before the 11th Army could contemplate launching any further major operations. These losses were on top of the 352,000 casualties of all types the Crimean Front had already suffered between January and April. For context, only the Western Front had sustained heavier losses over that same period, with 524,910 casualties. The Kalinin Front's losses had been of comparable magnitude to those of the Crimean Front, at 317,060. These three fronts accounted for a substantial share of the Red Army's total losses of 2,352,000 between January and April. The survivors were gathered at Budyonny's headquarters, where a formal inquiry into the disaster was convened. Stalin's reaction, upon receiving reports detailing the full extent of the defeat, was remarkable in what it revealed: he commented to Zhukov, "You see, that's where going on the defensive gets you." The observation was striking in its detachment from reality — the Crimean Front had been conducting near-continuous offensive operations since January, had been actively prevented from constructing proper defensive works by Mekhlis's incessant interference, and had collapsed in a rout rather than a methodical fighting withdrawal. Stalin's remark speaks less to the actual causes of the disaster than it does to his own deeply held conviction that an offensive posture must be maintained across all fronts at all times — a conviction that contributed directly to the catastrophes at both Kerch and Kharkov. Kozlov was demoted and eventually posted to the Trans-Baikal Military District for the remainder of the war. Mekhlis was reduced by two ranks to Corps Commissar, despite his energetic attempts to deflect responsibility onto others, and lost his positions as Deputy Defence Commissar and head of the Political Administration of the Red Army. Citino's assessment of Mekhlis is unsparing: his incompetent interference was worth an entire army corps to the Germans. All other senior officers of the Crimean Front were demoted and relegated to secondary postings. Only Kolganov of the 47th Army would manage to partially recover his professional reputation at a later stage of the war. The Bryansk Front had been scheduled to launch its offensive on the 12th in coordination with Timoshenko's Southwestern Front. The intended synchronisation was conceptually ambitious — a simultaneous Bryansk thrust was designed to pin German reserves in place and prevent their transfer south to reinforce against Timoshenko's main blow. Logistical difficulties, however, frustrated the build-up of the fuel and ammunition stockpiles needed to sustain the attack. Stalin granted Golikov a postponement to the 16th, but events elsewhere on the front had by that point made any offensive out of the question. The failure to launch the Bryansk Front's supporting attack on its original schedule would prove consequential in hindsight — it granted the Germans an operational flexibility in shifting formations precisely the kind of flexibility the original Soviet plan had been designed to prevent. Early on the 12th, Timoshenko's offensive opened with an hour-long combined aerial and artillery bombardment. Soviet advantages in manpower varied according to the source consulted, ranging from 3:2 to 1.5:1, though there is general agreement that the Soviets had concentrated a 2:1 advantage in armour over the Germans. Roughly half of the Soviet tank strength, however, consisted of lighter models — the T-60 and older BT-series tanks — rather than the heavier types that might have proved more decisive. The German Sixth Army reported that on the first day alone it was struck by six rifle divisions and more than three hundred tanks. As reports of the Soviet assault accumulated, Bock reported to Halder that the Sixth Army was fighting "for its life." Halder's initial response was dismissive — he characterised the early Soviet gains as nothing more than cosmetic blemishes on the map, and it required persistent effort from Bock to persuade him that they represented a genuine crisis before Halder would consent to releasing reinforcements to Paulus. The episode reflects a peculiar institutional dysfunction: Halder had spent months managing Hitler's volatile and unpredictable interventions in operational matters and had developed a reflexive caution about raising alarms prematurely with the Führer, even when the evidence before him was unambiguous. By midday on the 12th, the Soviet 6th and 28th Armies, together with Group Bobkin, had broken through the German first line of defence. In the south, the lightly equipped Hungarian 108th Infantry Division and the German 464th Security Division, both critically short of anti-tank weapons, had been brushed aside with minimal difficulty. The day's fighting produced advances of up to fifteen kilometres in depth. In the north, the 28th Army encountered stiffer resistance that constrained its initial progress, but the more experienced 38th Army on its southern flank moved quickly, advancing ten kilometres. The 38th's forward movement pulled the 28th Army along behind it as the Germans were forced to react. By the evening of the 12th, Soviet tanks attached to the 28th Army were positioned eighteen kilometres north of Kharkiv. Bock's response was to demand immediate counter-attacks. The 23rd Panzer Division, together with the 71st and 113rd Infantry Divisions, was released to the Sixth Army — formations that had been earmarked for Fridericus but were now redirected to deal with the immediate crisis. It would require further effort to persuade Halder to release divisions that had been set aside for the summer offensive, Fall Blau. This pressure also overrode the more cautious instincts of the relatively inexperienced Paulus, who had preferred to hold his village strongpoints defensively. Bock also transferred four air groups away from Crimea to support the Sixth Army, further straining the resources available to Manstein. By the 13th, the German 8th Corps had been pushed back to the Berestova River, with gaps opening on both its flanks. It had lost contact with Kleist's neighbouring Army Group and with the 51st Corps. The smaller of the two breaches in the German line was a sixteen-kilometre gap just southwest of Zmiiv. Through the larger southern breach, Soviet cavalry were attempting to infiltrate past German outposts toward Berestyn. The 28th Army had largely been brought to a halt by a German force that had been encircled and was holding the village strongpoint of Ternova. The 38th Army, however, was still advancing on its southern flank. In response, Paulus assembled the 23rd Panzer Division alongside the 71st and 113rd Infantry Divisions, incorporating elements drawn from the 3rd Panzer and 305th Infantry Divisions, to form a new battle group. This formation was thrown against the 38th Army with dive-bomber support. During this operation the Luftwaffe made extensive use of the Sprengbombe Dickwandig 2 kg butterfly anti-personnel cluster bomb — nicknamed the "Devil's Egg" by German ground crews — against three Soviet rifle divisions, which were forced to fall back to the Donets near Velyka Babka. There they managed to restore a defensive line with the assistance of three tank brigades. While Moskalenko succeeded in containing the German counter-attack, his army had absorbed sufficient damage to force him to abandon further offensive operations, leaving the 28th Army to continue its advance unsupported on its flank. By the dawn of the 14th, Volchansk's 28th Army had advanced nearly twenty kilometres, while Gorodnyanskii's 6th Army had penetrated almost twenty-five kilometres through German lines. With the Soviets seemingly holding the advantage, this is the point at which the historical record becomes contested and controversial. For reasons that remain disputed, Timoshenko failed to commit the substantial reserves that had been concentrated precisely for the purpose of exploiting the initial successes of those first two days. Some accounts hold that Timoshenko simply failed to recognise the moment of decision when it arrived. Others suggest he was rendered overly cautious by erroneous intelligence reports concerning large concentrations of German Panzers assembling around Zmiiv — a concern documented in a report to STAVKA that cited two Panzer divisions as a serious impediment to continued advance. Still others place the responsibility on the organisational failures of Army Headquarters and their inability to bring the Tank Corps to bear effectively. This last explanation carries some genuine weight: it was assumed by army commanders that the tank corps would follow closely behind the spearheads, but without any explicit orders to do so they remained sitting at their assembly areas. Even once the decision to commit them had been made, this organisational failure would delay their arrival and impact, a delay made worse still by the increasing weight of German air power over the operational area. It is worth noting that one of the principal advocates of the view blaming Army Headquarters was Bagramian, then serving as Chief of Staff of the Southern Front — a position that gave him an obvious professional interest in directing responsibility for the operation's failures away from his own level of command. Whatever the true cause, the armoured reserves of the Southwestern Front remained idle throughout the 14th. Soviet official histories would later be strikingly candid in acknowledging this failure. The History of the Second World War conceded bluntly that the front and theatre command "did not take advantage of the favorable situation existing on 14 May and did not put in the mobile forces to complete the encirclement." Moskalenko, commanding the 38th Army, attributed the failure to a fundamental indecisiveness at the front command level — Timoshenko, in his view, had waited for "a more favorable moment" and in doing so had allowed the moment that existed to pass him by entirely. Without the commitment of armoured reserves, the Soviet advance stalled. The stall was deepened by a critical shortage of artillery ammunition: when the offensive began, the front's artillery regiments had on average only two days' worth of ammunition available to them, despite the operational plan requiring them to deliver fire support for six days. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals [http://www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals]. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. In the Crimea, Soviet communications collapsed and a poorly prepared 47th Army failed to counterattack; artillery and air support were largely immobilized due to severed links, while German forces completed the encirclement of the 51st Army. Meanwhile, the Soviet offensive around Kharkiv initially broke through German lines, advancing rapidly with tank-heavy weight, but German counterattacks and Luftwaffe disruption slowed momentum.

Eastern Front #49 Operation Trappenjagd

Last time we spoke about the drive towards Kholm. STAVKA created the 53rd Army from Group Ksenofontov to secure the southern approaches to the Demyansk pocket, while additional artillery was allocated to support the forthcoming Soviet effort against the Ramushevo corridor. In parallel, OKH maintained that the Ostheer had grown stronger since June 1941, attributing this to newly formed divisions and continuing deliveries of equipment; however, this assessment tended to overlook lingering manpower shortages, inadequate replacement quality, and deficiencies in junior command. Plans for Kharkiv were likewise refined around a limited breakthrough aimed at facilitating an encirclement. In Crimea, Kozlov’s defensive posture was described as overstretched, and Manstein’s Luftwaffe-supported Trappenjagd was prepared for a coastal thrust toward the Black Sea.  This episode is Operation Trappenjagd Well hello there, welcome to the Eastern Front week by week podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about world war two? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on world war two and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel you can find a few videos all the way from the Opium Wars of the 1800’s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.    The fog of war was hitting hard in Ukraine, with both sides flying blind about what the enemy was cooking up next. Around Kharkiv, Generals Bock and Timoshenko were getting more and more jittery, each one half-expecting the other to beat them to the punch and kick off a massive offensive first. That paranoia sparked a noticeable uptick in small-scale hit-and-run raids all across Ukraine—especially in the Izyum Salient. The Soviets’ inexperience turned these nuisance attacks into a real headache for them, and it was yet another factor pushing back their own Kharkiv offensive until the 12th. Soviet staff officers were painfully green when it came to shuffling huge formations around; instead of crisp written orders, they often barked out conflicting verbal instructions that left units tangled up and crossing each other’s supply lines in a glorious mess. With so few experienced officers on hand, they were stretched ridiculously thin and simply couldn’t sort out the resulting chaos. On top of that, Luftwaffe interdiction raids kept hammering key roads and bridges, scattering troops every time a plane screamed overhead. After each strike, units had to scramble back together, tend to the wounded, and haul away damaged gear before they could even think about moving again.   These little raids were no accident—they were part of a bigger pattern of probing and poking that had been ramping up since late April. Both armies were desperately fishing for intelligence while trying to grind down the other side’s readiness. German reconnaissance flights and ground patrols kept spotting Soviet buildups in the salient, but the Soviets’ constant counter-raids—usually small infantry groups backed by a handful of tanks—kept Bock’s forces from going all-in on their own preparations without worrying about getting hit first. Meanwhile, Timoshenko was catching heat from STAVKA to hurry up and get ready for what would become the Second Battle of Kharkov. Logistical knots and command friction kept shoving his timetable back, though. All this mutual suspicion, fed by spotty intelligence, was setting the table for one of the Eastern Front’s most explosive spring showdowns—just days away.   While the final tweaks for that big offensive were happening elsewhere, spring fighting was about to flare up again in Crimea. As Citino points out, when Operation Trappenjagd kicked off, the Soviets held a comfortable two-to-one edge in manpower and equipment on the ground. In the air, though, the Germans enjoyed an overwhelming advantage—not just in numbers but in the quality of their planes and pilots. Those Soviet ground advantages were also partly wiped out by the sheer clumsiness of the Crimean Front’s command staff. The sudden spike in Luftwaffe activity was a dead giveaway that something big was coming. By the 5th, the Crimean Front was fully braced for a German attack; some reports even mentioned cheeky placards along the lines reading, “Come on. We are waiting.” Yet the Soviets still hadn’t bothered to dig in properly. Most of their fortifications were leftovers from 1941 or earlier, and only token work had been done to reposition headquarters and artillery. A few Soviet sources even claim that Kozlov was still planning another stab at Koi-Asan late on the 8th—even though he knew a German offensive was right around the corner.   This complacency came from months of Soviet pressure on the Parpach Isthmus. Since January, Kozlov’s Crimean Front—made up of the 44th, 51st, and 47th Armies—had been hammering away at Manstein’s thinly stretched 11th Army, which was also busy pinning down Soviet forces at Sevastopol. Those earlier attacks had bled the Soviets badly in men and machines, but they had also convinced Kozlov and his commissar, Lev Mekhlis, that the Germans were stuck on the defensive and ripe for one more push. Manstein, however, had been quietly perfecting a counterpunch, drawing on lessons from earlier campaigns and stressing the need to concentrate force exactly where it would hurt most. As he later wrote in his memoirs, he liked to park himself right behind the front lines before launching big operations so he could keep a personal eye on things—a habit that paid off big time amid the rugged Kerch Peninsula terrain. What’s more, the feints by a single German division and three Romanian ones under the 42nd Corps had completely sold Kozlov on the idea that any German attack would come in the north. The ramped-up Luftwaffe activity had also blinded his three reconnaissance squadrons. Kozlov bought the whole charade hook, line, and sinker, never once wondering why his recon assets had suddenly become the Luftwaffe’s favorite targets. He hadn’t even noticed that most of the 11th Army had vanished from the usual spots. As a result, both the 51st and the reserve 47th Armies had shifted north into the Kerch area, leaving the southern part of the line dangerously thin. The 44th Army was left holding the bag with just six divisions out of Kozlov’s total of 21. Nobody on the Crimean Front even dreamed that the real blow would fall on the 44th. Facing them, though, was more than half of the 11th Army. To pull off that kind of concentration, Manstein had left only the Romanian 4th Mountain Brigade to watch the Crimean coastline, while the 72nd Infantry Division alone guarded the southern slice of the Sevastopol siege lines (with the German 54th Corps and Romanian 19th Infantry Division covering the northern and eastern parts). It was a masterful piece of deception, playing perfectly on Soviet expectations shaped by earlier German probes and the peninsula’s natural choke points. The northern feint kept the bulk of Kozlov’s mobile reserves tied down, while the real hammer—assembled in secret despite the nightmare of hauling heavy gear over muddy spring roads—slammed into the weaker southern defenses where the 44th Army’s lines had almost no depth and almost no modern fortifications.   The original launch date for Operation Trappenjagd had already been pushed to the 7th, but on the 4th it slipped again. A burst of VVS activity right near the front made it impossible to sneak fighter units into forward airfields without being spotted. Richthofen was also sweating the delayed arrival of squadrons still stuck in Silesia. But May 8th promised excellent flying weather, and neither Manstein nor Richthofen wanted to let a perfect day go to waste. They had pulled together eleven bomber, three dive-bomber, and seven fighter Gruppen—555 combat aircraft in all. Operation Trappenjagd roared to life on May 8th with a colossal air assault. The Luftwaffe racked up more than 2,100 sorties that day; many crews flew multiple missions because their airfields sat just a few kilometers behind the lines. That short hop also let them carry heavier bomb loads since fuel wasn’t such a worry. The opening strikes hammered Crimean Front airfields, catching scores of Soviet planes on the ground, while fighter sweeps hunted down anything that got airborne. The Germans claimed 57 kills on day one alone. By noon, roughly a quarter of the Crimean Front’s air force had been wiped out. By May 9th the total climbed past 3,800 sorties, with the Luftwaffe claiming over 100 kills for the loss of just 23 of their own planes. Once air superiority was basically locked down, the Luftwaffe switched to pounding ground targets and choking off movement. Soviet radio discipline was terrible, so most command posts and positions were already lit up like Christmas trees; weak camouflage made them even easier to spot from above. Luftwaffe bombs also kept snapping the field telephone wires that linked everything together, turning communications across the entire front into a nightmare. Richthofen, who led the reinforced VIII Fliegerkorps, later called the scale of this concentrated air support “the likes of which has never existed,” highlighting how the Luftwaffe’s closeness to the battlefield let them turn around fast and hit with devastating accuracy that Soviet pilots—flying inferior machines and lacking the same training—simply couldn’t touch. This total control of the skies didn’t just neutralize the VVS; it sent a psychological shockwave through Soviet ground troops who found themselves constantly dodging Stukas and medium bombers with almost no friendly air cover in sight.   The ground attack jumped off at 04:15 with a blistering ten-minute artillery and rocket barrage. The moment the guns fell silent, three leading German divisions—backed by assault guns—stormed forward under a constant Luftwaffe umbrella. The stunned and suppressed Soviets could barely mount any real resistance. Strongpoints were isolated and bypassed, with follow-up waves of infantry expected to mop up anything that wasn’t critical to the advance. Within the hour they had covered the three kilometers to the antitank ditch that cut across the peninsula near Parpach and formed the 44th Army’s second line of defense. By 8 a.m. the 28th Light Infantry had crossed it in strength. The 41st Army’s first defensive belt had been shattered, along with most of the 63rd Mountain Rifle Division, and the second echelon was now wide open. Only the 50th Infantry Division ran into real trouble. Swamps south of Koi-Asan slowed them down, and thick Soviet minefields gave the defenders just enough breathing room to shake off the shock of the barrage and fight back—helped by a few Soviet tanks. The 50th only reached the Parpach ditch by nightfall. Manstein had deliberately chosen a narrow front to build breakthrough speed, counting on a short, sharp artillery prep (beefed up by Nebelwerfer rocket launchers) to keep the Soviets off-balance. As he later reflected, the trick was to exploit the lack of depth in the enemy’s positions—turning a numerically superior defense into a collapsing front through rapid penetration and bypass tactics.   To sweeten the deal, an infantry company with a platoon of pioneers had been slipped 1.3 km behind the Parpach ditch by the little boats of the 902 Sturmboote-Kommando. Luckily for them, months of Luftwaffe hammering had made the Black Sea Fleet pretty shy about operating near the Crimean coast. Historian Hayward points out that this caution went all the way back to February orders from Vice Admiral Oktyabrskii: his captains were told to be extremely careful in areas patrolled by enemy aircraft, to limit coastal bombardments to nighttime only, and never to risk bigger ships unless the weather grounded the Luftwaffe. Back in winter the long nights had given them decent cover; now, with shorter nights, better weather, and a much stronger Luftwaffe presence in Crimea, naval missions had become rare. So the Black Sea Fleet never showed up to stop the amphibious landing, which only drew some half-hearted mortar and light-artillery fire during the actual touchdown. Soviet artillery eventually sank thirteen of the assault boats over the course of the day. The landed troops quickly cleared the two bunkers guarding that stretch of coastline and called in the next wave. Before long an entire regiment was ashore, slamming into the Soviet second defensive line from behind. The 157th and 404th Rifle Divisions—supposed to be the 41st Army’s second echelon—couldn’t stop the double whammy of the amphibious landing and the frontal assault. Constant air attacks kept them pinned and unable to shift forces effectively. XXX Corps reported just 104 dead and 284 wounded while bagging 4,514 prisoners on day one. This bold flank insertion, pulled off under the cover of the main barrage and Luftwaffe umbrella, was a textbook example of the joint operations that made Trappenjagd so effective—catching the Soviets completely flat-footed and stopping any organized response to the main breakthrough cold.   Once the antitank ditch was behind them, the Groddeck Brigade was unleashed and sent racing toward Kerch as fast as humanly possible. Every available truck, car, and motorcycle was thrown into the effort to motorize as many men as they could, though plenty of infantry still had to pedal bicycles towed behind trucks on ropes. By the end of the day the brigade had pushed three kilometers ahead of the 28th Light Infantry, which itself had advanced nearly ten kilometers. The 22nd Panzer Division, however, had to sit tight while engineers built bridges strong enough for tanks—a job made slower by bypassed Soviet troops harassing the German rear. During the day Cherniak threw his tank reserves at the 28th Light Division, but Luftwaffe interdiction tore into them while they were still assembling; 48 out of 98 tanks were claimed knocked out before they could even join the fight. When the surviving Soviet tanks finally clashed with German ground forces, another 24 were lost in a lopsided scrap against a single battalion of StuG III assault guns. Only one StuG was written off as a total loss, with an unknown number damaged but repairable later. (It’s worth remembering that the Germans only counted a vehicle as “lost” if it was utterly beyond repair; lightly or even heavily damaged ones that could be fixed weeks or months down the line didn’t make the official loss lists. Sometimes crews abandoned tanks or planes in enemy territory hoping to recover them later, and a vehicle might not be officially listed as lost until a full month had passed. That’s why German loss figures always look so low—and why pinning down exact vehicle casualties can be a headache.   The Groddeck Brigade’s lightning exploitation showed the German love of motorized mobility in the pursuit phase, even when full panzer support was still waiting on the engineers. Luftwaffe strikes that day also mortally wounded General Lvov of the 51st Army. Combined with the destruction of the Front’s physical communications, it left Kozlov completely in the dark about how bad things really were on day one. He figured it was just a minor diversion and shifted only one rifle division from the 47th Army to help the 44th. He then casually told Cherniak to use that division for local counterattacks to push the Germans back—orders that the 30th Corps swatted aside with ease. Kozlov’s underestimation was a fatal command blunder, made worse by the loss of key leaders and the total paralysis of his headquarters under nonstop air and artillery pounding. Soviet command, already weighed down by political meddling from Mekhlis, simply crumbled under the speed and coordination of the German assault.   So on the 9th the German advance rolled on without missing a beat. Group Groddeck covered another 23 kilometers at high speed, brushing aside only light resistance—an NKVD rifle division and a depleted cavalry division that had no idea the Germans were even there. Most of the small Soviet groups they ran into were too shocked and confused to put up much of a fight. Fear and panic began racing through the Crimean Front as wild rumors spread of Germans running loose deep in the rear. Group Groddeck also had the good luck to hit an entirely undefended stretch of the Nasyr Line. Their pace let them seize the Marfovka airfield and destroy 35 I-153 fighter-bombers on the ground. Ironically, they moved so fast that the Luftwaffe itself was caught off guard—several times the 8th Air Corps mistook the big moving columns for retreating Soviets and strafed them. Colonel Groddeck himself was apparently wounded in one of those friendly-fire mix-ups. By the evening of the 10th the brigade was running low on fuel and ammo. Behind them the 132nd Infantry Division trudged along to secure the bypassed ground, while the 28th Light Infantry swung toward Arma-Eli and grabbed it by nightfall. Only in the late afternoon did the engineers finally finish bridges sturdy enough for the 22nd Panzer to roll. Their advance caught the 40th Tank Brigade completely by surprise in its assembly area, where it had been gearing up for a counterattack. Then heavy rain hit right before dark, stopping German mechanized movement cold and grounding the Luftwaffe. Some historians think the 22nd Panzer would have reached the coast and trapped most of the 51st and 47th Armies before nightfall if not for that downpour. Richthofen scribbled in his diary that night: “Unless the weather itself stops us, no Russian will leave the Crimea alive.” The rain also slowed the German infantry, especially those still in contact with Soviet forces. By now the momentum belonged completely to Manstein. His troops had smashed the southern sector and were already starting to roll up the Soviet lines from the flank—setting the stage for the huge encirclements that would follow in the days ahead.   Up on the Arctic coastline, fighting near Zapadnaya Litsa stayed mostly frozen in place thanks to heavy snowstorms. Hitler was convinced the area was a ticking time bomb, worried that the Anglo-Americans might try a naval landing somewhere along the Norwegian or Finnish coast. German high command pegged the stretch between Narvik and Pechenga as the most likely invasion spot. Pressure was mounting on Dietl to wrap things up quickly, but there were no spare reserves, so coastal defenses had to be stripped. Dietl and Schörner agreed to send the 2nd Mountain Division plus every small detachment between Tana Fjord and Pechenga Bay down to Litsa as reinforcements. These moves showed Berlin’s lingering paranoia about Allied landings in the far north—fears stoked by intelligence reports of increased shipping activity—even as the spring thaw turned the ground into a nightmare and limited any big operations.   At Kestenga the heavily outnumbered Finnish 3rd Corps was still being slowly pushed back. To capitalize, the Soviets sent a ski brigade and a rifle regiment on a wide flanking sweep south of the 3rd Corps positions. When Finnish intelligence spotted it, Siilasvuo wanted to pull his corps back between Lakes Pya and Top. Dietl overruled him, insisting any retreat would cost even more men and equipment, and ordered them to stand fast no matter what. By the 5th the main body of the Soviet flanking force was within three kilometers of the supply road, with advance elements practically on top of it. But that same day the main Soviet assault by the 26th Army bogged down in the swamps northwest of Kestenga. That gave the Finns and Germans just enough time to slap together a joint battlegroup and counterattack the flankers. By the 7th the Soviet flanking force was surrounded and essentially wiped out—only about one-tenth of the ski brigade made it back to Soviet lines. The 26th Army called off its offensive after exhausting itself in the swamps. Its huge numerical edge had been wasted on dozens of small, scattered attacks by individual units. The 186th Rifle and 23rd Guards Divisions plus the 80th Rifle Brigade had taken casualties as high as 40 percent. Dietl ordered a counterattack that day, but the spring thaw turned the whole region into a muddy quagmire that stopped everything dead. This Finnish-German teamwork in the far north showed just how brutal the terrain could be—Soviet flanking attempts often backfired because of overextension, while Axis positions held by tough mountain troops proved remarkably resilient.   Inside besieged Leningrad the drive to restart military production kept rolling. Seven new factories came online during May, bringing the total to 57 active plants. By the end of the month they would turn out 150 machine guns, 2,875 submachine guns, and 150,700 shells and mines. Outside the city, Finnish and German forces were spotted building up on the northern shores of Lake Ladoga. In response, Govorov beefed up defenses along the shoreline and its islands. Sukho Island eventually got a 100-man garrison with three 100 mm guns; its position was perfect for covering most of the southeastern Lake Ladoga coastline with artillery. These industrial efforts inside the city were a gritty display of Soviet resilience—workers grinding out weapons under constant bombardment and desperate shortages to keep the defense alive and prepare for future counteroffensives. The lake fortifications were meant to stop any Axis amphibious raids or supply disruptions across Ladoga, the city’s vital lifeline.   Desperate for more manpower to hold the lines around the encircled 2nd Shock Army, General Lindemann of the 18th Army told Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln to scrape together a battlegroup from his SS police units and Latvian security auxiliaries. These were to join the 50th Corps on the Leningrad siege lines so regular infantry divisions could be freed up for the next round of Soviet offensives. It was a telling sign of the manpower crunch facing Army Group North—regular divisions were being pulled toward hotter sectors while the siege lines still needed constant bodies to hold them.   On May 3rd STAVKA finally finished the command-and-control shake-up that followed the dissolution of the Volkhov Front. The 8th, 54th, 4th, 59th, and 2nd Shock Armies were grouped into the Volkhov Group of Forces, while the 23rd, 42nd, and 55th Armies plus the Neva and Coastal Operational Groups became the Leningrad Group of Forces. Malaia Vishera was named the Leningrad Front’s new headquarters. A few hours later an order arrived denying Khozin the reinforcements he had asked for. What happened next is still hotly debated among historians—partly because of the postwar rivalry and finger-pointing between Meretskov and Khozin. Meretskov claimed Khozin stayed upbeat and optimistic about his planned rescue of the 2nd Shock Army. Khozin later insisted that a big chunk of the 2nd Shock had already been pulled out of the pocket by the 3rd. Yet German records show almost no movement in or out of the pocket until May 21st, although some captured deserters started claiming in mid-May that the army was being withdrawn. Glantz splits the difference, saying that after hearing the refusal Khozin began preparing to evacuate the 13th Cavalry Corps, four rifle divisions, the 7th Tank Brigade, and all the sick and wounded of the 2nd Shock Army. They also hoped to pull out the army’s rear installations. None of these steps had actually been carried out yet. The reorganization showed STAVKA’s attempt to tidy up command during the brutal fight to relieve Leningrad, but the lack of reinforcements left Khozin’s forces in a very shaky spot—and it fueled endless postwar arguments about who was to blame for the 2nd Shock Army’s fate.   While the Leningrad area saw no major offensives, the German 16th Army’s sector stayed a cauldron of fighting. The 16th Army was busy with the relief of Kholm (which wrapped up on the 5th), so on May 3rd Korochkin launched a fresh offensive to pinch off the Ramushevo corridor. The Soviet 11th Army attacked the four-kilometer-wide corridor from the north while the 1st Shock Army hit from the south. Facing them were the battered infantry of the 2nd Corps. After months of siege and living on starvation rations, the Germans were in rough shape—every division was down to about one-third strength. Worse, a lot of the men still on the line would normally have been classified unfit for combat. Even so, and despite having to fight in two directions, the defenders gave up almost no ground all week. Just like their earlier repeated assaults on the Demyansk Pocket, these attacks were predictable in both timing and location—nothing like the earlier airborne attempt to disrupt the Demyansk airbridge. That predictability made life much easier for the 16th Army. Thick mud and standing water helped the defense even more. Although Kurochkin failed to overrun the corridor, his artillery kept up a constant barrage on the supply road to the 2nd Corps. That shelling, plus the mud, is why the Demyansk airbridge was still essential even after the link-up weeks earlier. The Demyansk salient—encircled since February—had become a symbol of German stubbornness, kept alive at huge cost by the airlift. Kurochkin’s predictable pushes let the weakened II Corps hold on and buy time for relief efforts elsewhere.   Army Group Center’s front and rear stayed relatively quiet except for the usual skirmishes and nonstop partisan attacks. Both the Ostheer and the Red Army were simply waiting for better weather before starting anything big. On the 4th Zhukov ordered Belov to dig in and hold his positions at all costs. The same instructions went to the 39th Army and the 11th Cavalry Corps, which were half-encircled behind the 9th Army. Meanwhile the Western and Kalinin Fronts kept building up. By late May the Kalinin Front was drawing rations for 601,894 men and the Western Front for 823,101. Ration strength is one way to track unit sizes, but it includes the sick and wounded the formations still have to feed, so it overstates immediate combat power—even though it’s useful for logistics planning. Even with that overestimate and some doubts about the numbers, more than a million men were being massed against Army Group Center. As a side note, Zhukov’s Western Theatre command had been dissolved and both the Kalinin and Western Fronts returned to direct STAVKA control—though sources disagree on the exact date, some saying early April and others May. On the 9th Belov’s encircled force received a battalion of anti-tank guns by air—kicking off a new airlift meant to strengthen Group Belov. On the same planes came General Mayor Golushkevich, Deputy Chief of Staff, carrying secret orders for Belov to be ready for a new southward offensive no later than June 5th. Belov was also told that the 50th Army would get major reinforcements and refitting in preparation for the joint attack. These moves showed Zhukov’s strategy of keeping pressure on German lines even inside encircled pockets, using air resupply to keep partisan-linked forces alive for future exploitation once the weather improved.   At the same time the Germans were busy planning Operation Hannover. The 4th Army was given a single corps headquarters and three divisions pulled from the 3rd Panzer Army (which had taken over for the 4th Panzer Army, now headed to Ukraine), plus a corps HQ and three divisions from its own forces. Their planning mistakenly assumed that most of Belov’s roughly 20,000-man force was east of the Ugra River because of bad intelligence. In reality only parts of the 4th Airborne Corps and the Zhabo Partisan Regiment were on that side. The Airborne had an active strength of 2,300 plus another 2,000 sick or wounded as of May 1st, and 1,700 attached partisans from the Zhabo regiment. If the Germans had been right, they could have launched a fast offensive along the river to split the 3,900-square-kilometer pocket into easier-to-handle chunks and bag most of Belov’s strength. Once Hannover wrapped up quickly, most of those forces were supposed to head north to help the 9th Army’s coming offensive. May 21st was the planned start date. The movement of these German divisions had already been spotted, which only encouraged Group Belov to dig in harder. German deception was already ramping up to hide bigger summer plans, but local clean-up operations like Hannover were meant to tidy up rear-area headaches first.   Even though the Soviets had noticed some of these smaller preparations, the Germans went to enormous lengths to hide their real summer intentions. After a Moscow newspaper somehow predicted a German summer offensive aimed at Voronezh and Stalingrad, Jodl demanded even heavier deception efforts ahead of Fall Blau. That gave birth to Operation Kremlin. Its first phase was to make the Soviets think the German summer buildup was actually happening in Army Group North and Center—especially to reinforce Soviet fears of another push toward Moscow. Fake headquarters were set up with bogus radio traffic suggesting frantic activity. Dummy aircraft were parked at phony airfields to simulate a bigger Luftwaffe presence. Security troops staged very visible fake redeployments. Reconnaissance raids were stepped up all along the front of both army groups. This elaborate maskirovka would play a huge part in keeping STAVKA guessing about the true direction of the coming campaign, giving the Germans precious time to prepare their southern thrust. And finally, after last week’s Reichstag speech Hitler had gone on a short holiday at the Berghof. But on May 3rd he cut the vacation short and returned to the Wolf’s Lair in Prussia. He said he simply couldn’t stand the sight of snow anymore after the horrors of the last winter. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals [http://www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals]. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. Operation Trappenjagd in Crimea proceeded with rare Black Sea interference, as Soviet artillery sank thirteen landing craft. German engineers and mobile exploitation then pushed rapidly toward Kerch, while Soviet command mistakes and Luftwaffe interdiction crippled attempted tank and counter moves; a downpour later slowed mechanization. In the Arctic, German and Finnish forces resisted Soviet flanking attempts near Kestenga as mud and bogs stalled offensives. Around Leningrad, factories expanded output and Lake Ladoga defenses strengthened, while STAVKA reorganized fronts after the Volkhov dissolution.

Eastern Front #48 Towards Kholm

Last time we spoke about the end of the winter offensive.STAVKA ordered the Western and Kalinin Fronts to defensive positions after heavy losses. Fighting persisted in pockets like Demyansk, where Germans relieved encircled forces at great cost, and Belov's cavalry/airborne group near Moscow, increasingly isolated as the 50th Army failed to link up. In the north, the 2nd Shock Army near Volkhov faced encirclement; General Vlasov was appointed to salvage it. Leningrad's siege continued, with German air raids damaging ships and the Road of Life halting due to thaw. German plans included summer operations like Nordlicht to capture Leningrad. In the center, rear-area raids and failed offensives left Belov's forces vulnerable. In the south, debates delayed Operation Fridericus; Manstein prepared Trappenjagd in Crimea, with Richthofen leading air support. Stalin planned a Kharkiv offensive, but secrecy faltered when General Samokhin was captured with plans. Gehlen's Operation Flamingo infiltrated Soviet command. This episode is the Towards Kholm Well hello there, welcome to the Eastern Front week by week podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about world war two? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on world war two and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel you can find a few videos all the way from the Opium Wars of the 1800’s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.    The end of April was relatively quiet on the Eastern Front as the combatants looked to recover from several months of constant fighting. However, conflict still occurred. In the Arctic, the Soviets expanded their offensive while the Germans attempted to finally relieve the garrison at Kholm. This week, we will cover the events of April 26th to May 2nd, 1942, as OKW decided they did not like OKH’s old report and created a new one. The Soviet offensive in the Arctic expanded on the 27th with the 14th Army attacking over the Litsa. The 10th Guard and 14th Rifle divisions struck the 6th Mountain division on both its flanks. During the night, the 12th Naval brigade crossed the Litsa bay and exploited the open flank. This caught the Mountain Corps of Norway completely by surprise. The assault formed part of a broader Soviet effort to seize Petsamo and threaten the vital nickel mines that supplied German war industry, with naval infantry and land forces coordinating in a three-phased push supported by the Northern Fleet. However, the Naval brigade’s advance was stopped at the end of April by extreme snowstorms, which stalled all movement in the area for several days. This gave the 6th Mountain Division time to recover and reorganize its battered lines before the weather finally broke.   Meanwhile, the Germans were struggling to deal with the offensive launched in the Kestenga region last week. On May 1st, Dietl was forced to request that the Finnish 12th Brigade be transferred to reinforce the Finnish 3rd Corps. Mannerheim, however, refused, as he was unwilling to be drawn into a lengthy operation that might overcommit Finnish resources far from their own strategic priorities. On the other hand, he offered to transfer the 163rd Infantry Division to Dietl’s command and assume responsibility for the Ukhta section of the front, but only after a German Corps relieved the 3rd Corps. While this was no immediate help to Dietl, it would mean he was no longer responsible for Ukhta and that he was gaining a new division under his command. Thus, it was accepted. With no help arriving from the Finnish, Dietl was forced to bring in further battalions from neighbouring formations, scraping together whatever reserves he could from already stretched units across the far northern sector. At the same time, the Soviet 26th Army reinforced its attempt to envelop the 3rd Corps with the 186th Rifle Division and the 80th Rifle Brigade. This meant Siilasvuo’s 9 battalions were now opposing 2 Soviet divisions and 2 brigades, a ratio that highlighted the growing imbalance in the frozen wilderness.   These events convince Mannerheim to abandon his plans to downsize Finnish infantry divisions into brigades. Those plans had been based on the assumption that the war was nearly won and that only minimal forces were needed to hold the front line until the USSR’s surrender. This was now very evidently false. While only two divisions had fully completed the conversion, many Finnish divisions would find themself partially converted with a heavily reduced third regiment, a structural weakness that would haunt the Finnish Army for the remainder of the Continuation War as manpower demands continued to mount.   With the start of May, the recently arrived He-111 torpedo bombers started operations from their Norwegian bases. On May 2nd, they attacked Convoy PQ 15 and claimed to have sunk 3 vessels. In reality, one of the hit vessels had only been damaged, but this vessel would later be sunk by a German submarine. The strikes came from aircraft of KG 26 operating out of Bardufoss, targeting the Allied supply run to Murmansk in a daring low-level torpedo run that caught the convoy north of Norway; the merchant ships Botavon, Jutland, and Cape Corso were among those lost, with heavy loss of life aboard. May would also see a continuation of the German naval build-up, and by the end of the month, 1 battleship, 3 heavy cruisers, 8 destroyers, 4 torpedo boats, and 20 submarines would be based in Norway. However, the lengthening daylight hours in the Arctic meant submarines were becoming increasingly easy to spot, making their sorties increasingly dangerous as Allied air cover and escorts grew more effective with the changing season.   The Leningrad Front’s bridgehead across the Neva River at Nevskaia Dubrovka would be crushed by a small offensive by the 18th Army on the 29th. The assault had started back on the 26th with a heavy artillery barrage. The 357 Soviet defenders from the 86th Rifle division would manage to hold out for three days against repeated infantry assaults before being overwhelmed. Most of the soviet defenders would end up being killed in the battle, including the divisional chief of Staff Major Kozlov. The elimination of this small but irritating bridgehead allowed the Germans to shorten their lines slightly and redirect artillery that had been pinned down covering the crossing.   On the 30th, Khozin would order the 2nd Shock Army to adopt an all-around defensive posture in the Lyuban salient. The 13th Cavalry Corps was to be kept as a mobile reserve force for the Army. He hoped this move would buy time to plan and prepare a new operation. Its goal was to widen the corridor connecting the 2nd Shock Army to Soviet lines. On May 2nd, Khozin would report his plans to STAVKA. The Kirishi sector was seen as vital to crush to free up forces from the 4th Army for use elsewhere, while the Spasskaia Polist' region was also seen as vital as it dominated the communication routes to the 2nd Shock Army. These adjustments reflected the hard lessons of the winter fighting, where overextended salients had repeatedly invited German counterattacks.   To resolve this, a series of offensives was planned for early May. The 59th Army was to take Spasskaia Polist, while the 54th would continue toward Lipovik to support the 4th Army and also prepare an offensive on Lyuban. The 4th Army was to attack Kirishi, then advance on Chudovo. Meanwhile, the 2nd Shock Army would largely stay on the defensive, though it was to form a small shock group to support the 59th Army and prepare its own offensive on Lyuban once the 6th Guards Rifle Corps arrived. It seems, then, that Meretskov had won the previous week’s debate. The 13th Cavalry Corps was to remain in reserve to exploit any success by the 2nd Shock Army and 6th Guards Rifle Corps. These operations were tentatively set for mid to late May. Khozin then submitted a series of reinforcement requests and listed the formations needing rehabilitation. While STAVKA approved his operational plans on May 3rd, it made no comment on the requested reinforcements, leaving field commanders to improvise with what little extra support might trickle down from the strategic reserve.   Throughout May, partisans would continue to smuggle resources into Leningrad. 500 tons of bread, meat, and other products from occupied regions were transferred into the city to help sustain the population. Scurvy had become an issue during the winter. City officials had countered the rise of this health issue by producing Vitamin C extract from pine needles. They produced 738,500 liters of pine extract in the first half of 1942. There, the conditions were slowly improving. The Leningrad funeral trust recorded burying 102,497 bodies in April. This decreased to “only” 53,562 in May. These grim figures, while still horrifying, marked a turning point after the catastrophic winter, as the partial reopening of supply lines and the heroic efforts of the “Road of Life” across Lake Ladoga began to ease the worst of the famine that had claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. With Demyansk relieved last week, the 16th Army's main priority was now to relieve Kholm. Group Lang started its assault to relieve Scherer on April 30th. Blocking their way was the heavily dug-in 8th Guard Rifle Division supported by the 71st Tank Brigade. Constant heavy Luftwaffe support was needed to blast a way north. This initial charge reached within 2km of Kholm before getting bogged down by the evening of the 30th. The defenders under Generalmajor Theodor Scherer had already endured months of isolation, reduced by this point to roughly 1,500 combat-effective men from an original force of around 5,500, fighting with whatever weapons and ammunition could be flown in or dropped by glider.   Thus, Purkaev realised time was running out to capture Kholm, so that evening he launched a massive assault on Scherer’s garrison. Overnight, a massive artillery barrage knocked out the majority of the garrison’s heavy weapons. Then, at 5:45 am on May 1st, three rifle regiments and 15 tanks launched concentric attacks on the town. Multiple T-34s broke into Kholm, and the defences around the Red Ruins nearly collapsed. Urgent Stuka support was called in to drive the tanks back. As this arrived, so did a new 5cm AT gun, which was delivered via glider—an audacious resupply that proved decisive in the close-quarters fighting. This support would eventually allow Scherer’s forces to stop and contain the Soviets after a roughly seven-hour battle. 7 Soviet tanks alone were found knocked out around the airstrip, where fighting had been partially intense. The garrison’s survival hung by a thread, but the combination of airpower and desperate improvisation had bought just enough time.   Group Lang spent the next several days bogged down along the Kholm road, unable to defeat the last layers of Soviet defences. Then, on the 5th, Lang gathered his forces for one final effort in coordination with Stuka support. This allowed the 411th Infantry Regiment to create a breach in the 3rd Shock Army’s Lines. Through this, a small battlegroup of two assault guns and 60 infantry rushed into Kholm. Scherer’s garrison was relieved after a 105-day-long siege. Forczyk states Scherer had suffered 60% casualties with 1,500 killed and 2,200 wounded from his original force of 4,500. However, he also estimated the 3rd Shock Army had suffered up to 25,000 casualties during the Siege of Kholm. Scherer’s garrison would be replaced with the 218th Infantry Division, and its survivors were withdrawn to Germany for home leave. Kholm would remain in German hands as a heavily fortified strongpoint, a thorn in the Soviet side that continued to tie down forces long after the relief.   During the entire sieges of Demyansk or Kholm, the VVS of the Northwestern Front, for some reason, never decided to raid the primary airbases at Pskov or Ostrov. Nor did they attack the supporting fighter bases around Dno. This could have seriously disrupted the Demyansk airbridge, which was essential for the survival of the 2nd Corps inside the pocket—perhaps due to poor coordination, competing priorities elsewhere, or the Luftwaffe’s own fighter cover making such raids too costly. Between the start of the airbridge in January and the relief of Kholm in early May, 14,455 transport sorties were flown to Kholm and Demyansk. This brought in 24,303 tons of supplies and equipment, in addition to 15,446 replacements, for the hard-pressed troops inside the pocket. 22,093 wounded were extracted on the return flights. This had come at a steep cost. The transport groups lost 125 aircraft, with another 140 seriously damaged. Furthermore 387 aircrew were killed during these missions. These losses would amount to roughly half of all the transport airframes Germany would build throughout 1942. It had also consumed 42,155 tons of aviation fuel, which was nearly one-third of the aviation fuel produced in the Reich in a month. The operation had also severely disrupted pilot training programs, with pilots and airframes ruthlessly stripped away from training groups to replace losses and bring up their numbers.   And the losses would not stop here. Demyansk may have been relieved, and supplies reached them through the Ramushevo corridor. However, even by the end of May, only 50 to 100 tons of supplies per day would reach the 2nd Corps over ground. The Luftwaffe would need to supply the rest of the Corps' minimum daily supply of 300 tons. The only bright side was that improving weather would gradually increase the efficiency of the transports, allowing groups to be transferred away. Morzik would eventually release all but three groups, which were needed to keep the 2nd Army Corps supplied in its overextended position. These missions would continue all the way until the Stalingrad operation, with another 18,639 transport sorties flown after the creation of the Ramushevo corridor. While the Airlift had saved the 2nd Corps and Scherer’s Kholm garrison, Morzik considered it a horrific failure due to its costs. Furthermore, Hitler and the Wehrmacht had been encouraged and rewarded for holding on to several hopeless positions and thus would do so again in the future, a dangerous precedent that would echo in later campaigns.   In response to these events, STAVKA would detach Group Ksenofontov from the Kalinin Front and use it as a cadre to form the 53rd Army. This was tasked with holding the south of the Demyansk Pocket. The Northwestern Front would also be assigned nine Artillery Regiments from STAVKA reserve forces to bolster its firepower. These were to support an upcoming operation with the 1st Shock and 11th Armies against the Ramushevo Corridor due to start next week, signalling Soviet intent to keep pressure on the Germans even as winter gave way to spring.   Unhappy with the previous OKW report on Ostheer’s strength, the OKH sought to remove what it saw as nonsense. In purely numerical terms, the Army was now judged stronger than in June 1941, with 7 new infantry divisions, 2 new panzer divisions, and 4 more infantry divisions expected soon. The 625,000-manpower shortfall, despite 1.1 million replacements, was quietly overlooked, as was the poor quality of many replacements and new troops. The shortage of skilled NCOs and junior officers was likewise downplayed. On the other hand, the report was satisfied with weapons deliveries to the frontline, which would meet the needs of Army Group South, even if the other two Army Groups still lacked heavy equipment. Ziemke claims: “725,000 rifles, 27,000 machine guns, 2,700 antitank guns, and 559 pieces of light and 350 pieces of heavy field artillery” For comparison Erickson claims the Soviets produced during the winter alone “4,500 tanks, some 3,000 aircraft, nearly 14,000 guns[artillery pieces] and over 50,000 mortars”   The report did admit artillery and anti-tank ammunition supplies; however, they were likely to be a concern due to delays in increasing their production. This assessment painted an optimistic picture that masked deeper structural weaknesses, with Army Group South receiving priority at the clear expense of the other two army groups.   Meanwhile, the 3,300 tanks believed to be on hand were smaller than in Operation Barbarossa; this was more than made up for by the increase in the armaments on these vehicles. Both the Panzer III and Panzer IV had been upgraded since 1941, as had support vehicles like the StuG. Obsolete light tanks were also being converted into vehicles such as the Marder II tank destroyer. The report admitted that mobility had declined sharply, with Army Group South retaining only 80% of its original mobility. This came at the cost of demotorising its regular infantry and denying motorisation to the other two Army Groups. Even so, there remained a 75,000-vehicle shortfall, of which only half was expected to be replaced. Worse still, current production was below the losses anticipated for Fall Blau. As a result, nearly 250,000 horses were to be requisitioned across Germany and the occupied territories to help make up the deficit and replace those already lost, a stark reminder that the Wehrmacht was increasingly reliant on horse-drawn transport even as it prepared for its next great summer offensive.   Following this, on May 1st, Gehlen would report that the Soviets were largely on the defensive across the front, but wearing down attacks were extremely likely. Kharkiv was identified as a particularly likely target for a Soviet attack. However, it was insisted that none of these attacks would likely cause a breakthrough, an assessment that would soon be put to the test. In the Army Group Center’s sector, the flow of formations south started. The 4th Panzer Army HQ would be transferred to Army Group South, as would five of the twenty Corps-level Headquarters. For the most part, the frontline was quiet with both sides looking to recover from their winter ordeals. Still, minor skirmishes and other small actions were commonplace even when no major operation was underway, as exhausted units probed for weaknesses and gathered intelligence.   Behind German lines, the Belov’s Guard Cavalry and the 8th Airborne Corps had all gone on to the defensive by the 26th. On the other side of the German lines, the 50th Army had also halted its offensive. They had not been able to sever the Warsaw highway nor link up. With this cessation of the offensive, local German forces would attempt to counterattack the Airborne troopers. However, the same waist-high floodwater had hindered the paratrooper’s offensive through the swamp land and now obstructed German offensives. For the rest of April, attacks against the Soviet village strongholds were easily repulsed. Under these conditions, Zhukov granted the paratroopers permission to withdraw to their pre-offensive positions. After the Germans noticed this withdrawal, they followed closely behind but did not engage the Soviets, apart from some small skirmishes. Both sides were relatively content to entrench themselves and recover throughout the early days of May. New airstrips were constructed in the Soviet territory to bring in sufficient supplies to keep Belov’s forces adequately supplied. The 1st Guard Cavalry Corps occupied the northern sector of the line from Dorogobuzh to south of Viaz’ma. The 1st Partisan regiment covered the Northeastern flank, supported by a composite battalion drawn from survivors of the 33rd Army. Belov and Kazakin still hoped to return to Soviet lines but knew they needed time to recover before making any new attempt, buying precious weeks to reorganize their battered but still dangerous raiding force.   On April 28th, Timoshenko would finalise the plans for the Kharkiv offensive with Directive 00275. Several alterations had been made after multiple protests from Timoshenko’s subordinates. One example was General Moskalenko of the 38th Army, who had been concerned about the initial major role given to the green 28th Army. Their men and command structure had not yet seen combat, while the 38th Army had been fighting in the local area for months already. This had led to the 28th neighbouring armies being ordered to support their offensive. Group Bobkin was created out of concern that the 6th Army’s Shock group was too large and dispersed to be controlled by a single officer, thus necessitating the division of command. However, not all concerns about the offensive were listened to. Shaposhnikov and several other figures thought Timoshenko was mad for cramming so many forces into the Izyum Salient. Timoshenko, however, would manage to convince Stalin that the operation would be a complete success despite these fears. While May 4th had been initially set as the offensive start date, last week's redeployment problems, which continued into this week, delayed the offensive until the 12th. The rushed planning reflected the high command’s eagerness to strike before German reinforcements could fully arrive, even as intelligence warnings about enemy concentrations began to filter in.   The 28th Army was to attack from the Volchansk bridgehead northeast of Kharkiv, supported by the 21st and 38th Armies. Riabyshev’s shock group, made up of 6 rifle divisions and 4 tank brigades, would strike along a narrow 20-km front against the German 17th Corps. Once a breach was made, the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps would dash through and wheel south to encircle Kharkiv. At the same time, the 6th Army was to attack from the Izyum bulge with 8 rifle divisions, 4 tank brigades, and Operational Group Bobkin, which included 2 rifle divisions, a cavalry corps, and a tank brigade. After breaking the German 8th Corps, the new 21st and 23rd Tank Corps would exploit the gap and link up with the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps, while the 6th Cavalry Corps raced toward Berestyn to form the outer encirclement ring. If successful, the Soviets would not only retake Kharkiv but also encircle much of the German 6th Army. The Southern Front would protect the flank, with the 57th Army defending Lozova and the 9th Army holding Barvinkove. May 4th was set as the starting date. Despite the postponement, Soviet redeployment remained rushed, allowing the Germans to detect parts of the buildup. Defensive works were therefore expanded across the front, using coerced local labour and requisitioned local materials. Strongpoints dominating key communications were heavily reinforced, and positions were designed to hold out even if encircled. The formations in Ukraine were also the strongest in the Ostheer, having been prioritized for replacements. By May 1st, there were on average only 2,400 vacancies per infantry division in Army Group South. It was hoped to fully restore the Army Group’s infantry before Fall Blau started, although this would be at the expense of the amount and quality of replacements going to the other two army groups. Meanwhile, Bock’s HQ would issue Army Group South Directive 1 on the 29th, providing a detailed plan for the BLAU operations. Bock would also complain in his diary “In the evening, on the insistence of the OKH, the first draft of our directive for the [summer] offensive was hastily thrown together” There had been no terrain studies nor consultation with the involved army commands nor with OKH. The rushed directive was done solely as a desk exercise. This assumed that Bock would retain control of the entire Army Group until the completion of Blau II, at which point the split into Army Groups A and B would occur. Group B would hold the line from Kursk to Stalingrad using the Don River when possible. Group A would be responsible for capturing Stalingrad and then driving into it. The plan reflected the high command’s growing confidence in a renewed summer drive toward the Caucasus oil fields, even as local threats loomed.   Also, the quibbling over Operation Fridericus would end on the 30th, largely due to Hitler’s pressure. Remarking the decision as “born in severe pain and on the whole not pretty”, Bock reluctantly ordered Fridericus II into effect with a tentative start date of May 18th. Thus, German forces north and south of the Izyum Salient started to concentrate near its neck. As the Germans moved to attack and defend simultaneously, the floodwaters of major rivers began to subside. At the same time, roads started to become recognisable as roads as the Rasputitsa finally started to ebb away in Ukraine, opening the way for the mobile operations both sides now craved. In Crimea, both sides were likewise making final preparations for a new offensive on the Kerch Peninsula. Kozlov was preparing yet another attack on Koi-Asan. It remains disputed whether STAVKA ordered the Crimean Front to go on the defensive, only for Budenny, Kozlov, and Mekhlis to ignore it, or whether STAVKA instead urged Kozlov to attack again. What is clear is that the Crimean Front made no serious effort to build defense in depth. Foxholes, trenches, and other fieldworks were treated as a waste of effort better spent preparing for the next offensive. Two-thirds of Kozlov’s forces were concentrated within the northern 51st Army, with nine divisions crammed into the salient and more in reserve—a deployment that left the southern sector dangerously thin.   Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe continued to increase its advantage over Crimea. Back on the 24th, the VVS commander of Sevastopol Ostryakov, was assassinated alongside the deputy commander of Naval Aviation, Korobkov, in a precision strike from six JU-88. Korobkov had just arrived to conduct a STAVKA inspection. Lax radio discipline had allowed German signals intelligence to learn about the event and its itinerary. By May 1st, Richthofen had arrived in Crimea and established a headquarters in Kischlaw. Unofficially, the 8th Air Corps and Wild's provisional Air Command South were independent of each other. In reality, Richthofen subsumed Wild’s command into his Air Corp which would be officially recognised several weeks later.   The day after Richthofen arrived, Manstein held the final briefing for Trappenjagd, describing it as a ground offensive whose main effort would come from the air. The Luftwaffe was to pull the infantry forward. With Kozlov preparing a new offensive and the diversionary attacks of the 42nd Corps and the Romanians drawing many Soviet forces north of Kerch, only three divisions of the 44th Army held the front line, with three more in reserve. Opposing them, Manstein concentrated two infantry divisions and one light infantry division as the spearhead of his attack. They were to be amply supported with combat engineers, two batteries of Flak 88 guns, and 3 Assault Gun battalions. A makeshift motorised brigade known as the Groddeck Motorized Brigade, despite being near divisional strength, was formed as an offensive reserve. After the Parpach Antitank ditch had been breached, the 22nd Panzer and 170th Infantry Division would be ordered to race towards Kerch. In his briefing, Manstein explained the plan’s logic: the Soviets had massed two-thirds of their forces in the northern sector, leaving the south thinly held with only three divisions in line and two or three in reserve. “We intended to make our decisive thrust… down in the southern sector, along the Black Sea coast. In other words, in the place where the enemy would be least expecting it.” 5th May was hoped to be the start date, but bad weather stranded two fighter groups and a ground attack wing in Silesia. This forced a delay until the 7th to allow these formations to arrive in Crimea. The three reconnaissance squadrons of the Crimean VVS with ancient aircraft missed all of the German preparations, leaving Kozlov largely blind to the gathering storm.   And lastly, on the 26th, Hitler would give a speech at the Reichstag. Here, all the defeats and reverses of the Winter were transmuted into a stunning victory over the elements emphasised with many comparisons to Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 campaign. In the speech, Hitler declared, “We have a gigantic winter battle behind us. The hour will come when the fronts will awaken from their paralyzed state,” framing the retreat to a stable line from Taganrog to Lake Ladoga as a triumph of German will against temperatures that had dropped to 52 degrees below zero at points. However, he would use this speech as an excuse to gain more power over the German generals; the Reichstag unanimously granted him sweeping new authority to act without legal constraints, allowing him to punish or remove any German—soldier, officer, judge, or official—without due process if he deemed it necessary for victory. Similarly, on May 1st, Stalin would issue his annual May Day order.    May Day order. 130 “…  Greeting you and congratulating you on this First of May, I order: 1. The men of the rank and file to study their rifles to perfection, to become plasters of their arms, to hit the enemy without fail, just as our glorious snipers, the exterminators of the German occupationists, are hitting them! 2. Machine-gunners, artillerymen, mortar crews, tankmen and fliers to study their arms to perfection, become experts at their jobs, to hit the German-fascist invaders point-blank until their final extermination. 3. Commanders of all units—to learn to perfection the art of co-ordinating the various branches of the service, to become expert in the art of commanding troops, to show the whole world that the Red Army is capable of fulfilling its great mission of liberation! 4. The entire Red Army—to make 1942 the year of the final rout of the German-fascist troops and the liberation of the Soviet land from the Hitlerite blackguards! 5. Men and women guerillas—to intensify partisan warfare in the rear of the German invaders, destroy the enemy’s communications and transport facilities, to destroy the headquarters and equipment of the enemy, and not to spare any cartridges against the oppressors of our Motherland! Under the invincible banner of the great Lenin—forward to victory!”   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals [http://www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals]. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. STAVKA ordered the Western and Kalinin Fronts into defensive positions, reflecting severe losses, while skirmishes continued around Demyansk and near Moscow. German forces struggled too: Soviet offensives grew in the Arctic, endangering key resources, even as the Kholm garrison stayed under siege. Elsewhere, the 18th Army cleared a Soviet bridgehead near Leningrad, enabling German operational adjustments. Finnish troops under Mannerheim managed mounting Soviet pressure with limited resources.